Example sentences of "[not/n't] so [adv] a [noun sg] [prep] " in BNC.
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| 1 | John Clare testifies to the wholesale obliteration of landmarks , and the subsequent consciousness of alienation ; The Female Vagrant is not so much a poem by Wordsworth as a case-history . |
| 2 | It 's not so much a lack of generosity — a real miserliness . |
| 3 | And what was tending to happen here , as the Scottish Typographical Circular regularly reported , was not so much a division of labour between women on straight setting and men on other processes , but rather the diversion of certain kinds of typesetting from the linesmen ( male piece-workers ) to the women , who were not only paid much less but who were also considered by some employers to be actually better at it . |
| 4 | It is not so much a problem of hardware development outpacing software , or vice versa . |
| 5 | It is worth speculating on whether , from the locals ' point of view , the proliferation of village organizations reflects not so much a flourishing of community life as a symbol of its downfall . |
| 6 | His treatment of the " Alliterative Revival " is in some ways reminiscent of earlier treatments which argue that later alliterative writing in English reflects not so much a continuation of OE principles ( which language-change would in any case have made unlikely ) , but a re-invention from a tradition of alliterative prose-writing which began with AElfric . |
| 7 | As usually happens , the ‘ sponsorship role ’ of the Electricity Division led to Murray becoming not so much a controller of the industry as an honest broker between the BEA and the Whitehall machine in general . |
| 8 | The degree of risk created by the bad driving should be regarded as the crucial factor ; it is not so much a question of whether the sentence should be more severe when the risk eventuates , as whether the sentence should be more lenient when the risk does not materialize . |
| 9 | When the economic crisis became severe , community mobilization became not so much a question of participation in decision-making as practical support to keep schools and education projects going . |
| 10 | However , Ms Callil says that overall it is not so much a question of bigger profits , as ‘ less loss ’ . |
| 11 | This has been not so much a question of exegesis but of hermeneutics , searching for the underlying meaning and background to the understanding and belief in the demonic world ( see Carr 1981 ) . |
| 12 | It 's not so much a question of pushing the music as finding the way to let it pull the listener through . |
| 13 | Clara could not explain to the school that it was not so much a question of finance , as of her mother 's instinctive opposition to any pleasurable project — and anyone could see that a visit to Paris could not possibly fail to entail more pleasure than instruction . |
| 14 | It is not so much a question of what is promised as of the attitudes of those who will implement the decisions if the Tories are successful . |
| 15 | Hence the mink is not so much a threat to the muskrat population as a direct competitor with muskrat trappers . |
| 16 | The phrase ‘ innocent women and children ’ is not so much a slur on men as a way of infantilising women — classing them , with children , as helpless and passive victims incapable of political agency or moral judgement . |
| 17 | Though Masonry was always to be an element in the liberal forces — particularly in later non-socialist brands of Republicanism — it was never again , as it was from 1815 to 1820 , its chief framework ; even then it was not so much a system of belief as the only clandestine organization available for conspiracy . |
| 18 | Indeed , it is not so much a case of them accompanying the AIB team members as of them being part of the team . |
| 19 | Your selection of wayward notices ( 27th November ) reminded me of one I saw in my hotel in Frankfurt — not so much a case of bad translation , as a question of logic . |
| 20 | It is , then , not so much a case of ellipsis occurring in informal speech as of writing requiring a degree of elaboration that is not necessary in informal speech . |
| 21 | It is not so much a case of Captain Bob as of Major John and Petty Officer Newton . |
| 22 | It was not so much a case of social science theories being senseless , misguided or absurd , but more to do with their serious lack of evidential support . |
| 23 | However , jailing Shields for three months , Sheriff William Fulton told him : ‘ It is not so much a case of stealing from this house as plundering it , ransacking it and leaving it in an awful mess . |
| 24 | It was not so much a case of Glasgow getting worse as one of the rest of the country improving faster . |
| 25 | ‘ When you travel round the world , and being brought up in a family like mine , you learn that what happens on the field is actually very important to people elsewhere , and you feel , perhaps not so much a sense of responsibility , as a sense of focus in which people identify nationally for the best kind of reasons , and are made aware of who they are and what they came from . |
| 26 | In retrospect the decline of the tram in Britain was not so much a response to technological change but more a decision to cut capital investment in public transport . |
| 27 | Yet the sensitivities of both for the sufferings of men , women , and children drawn unwillingly into the war reflect something of the way in which thinking men asked themselves whether war was , in fact , not so much a way to peace as the prolongation of bitter conflict . |
| 28 | Perhaps not so much a way of life , but what Wittgenstein called a ‘ form of life ’ : small and privatised world-views binding on the group and consisting of accepted social practices , group norms and common languages ( by the latter I do not mean natural languages like French or English , but a nomenclature or group argot ) . |
| 29 | To claim money as a major human goal is not to make any specific claim about ‘ human nature ’ ( such as its mercenariness ) since it is not so much a goal in itself but the facilitator of almost all possible human goals — expressive , artistic , acquisitive or whatever . |
| 30 | I should explain to the Secretary of State that what has been involved is not so much a loss of dignity as a destruction of credibility . |