Example sentences of "so [adv] a [noun sg] [prep] [noun] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | 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 . |
| 2 | 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 . |
| 3 | It is not so much a case of Captain Bob as of Major John and Petty Officer Newton . |
| 4 | It was n't so much a case of thinking : he looks a lovely chappie . |
| 5 | It was not so much a case of Glasgow getting worse as one of the rest of the country improving faster . |
| 6 | 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 . |
| 7 | 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 . |
| 8 | 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 . |
| 9 | 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 . |
| 10 | It 's not so much a lack of generosity — a real miserliness . |
| 11 | Punch is certainly one of the great British institutions , and has become so much a way of life as to make it impossible to imagine a world without it . |
| 12 | 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 ) . |
| 13 | 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 . |
| 14 | ‘ 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 . |
| 15 | 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 . |
| 16 | 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 ) . |
| 17 | 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 . |
| 18 | It is not so much a problem of hardware development outpacing software , or vice versa . |
| 19 | This island seems overrun with small black pigs ( animals so much a part of Tongan life that when Captain Cook presented a pair of hitherto unknown Guernsey cows to the King they were classified as ‘ Cook 's pigs ’ , and the name has stuck for cows ever since ) , and with Australian cruising ‘ yachties ’ who use the Niuas ( as Schouten and LeMaire once did ) as the formal port of entry to the kingdom . |
| 20 | Any would be magnificent and there is time to knit several of them for ‘ specials ’ but I have n't said anything yet about small ‘ fun ’ presents and decorations which are so much a part of Christmas . |
| 21 | As for his goodness , the attempt to live a Christian life was so much a part of Irwin 's public persona that the legend became current that , arriving in India on Good Friday , he ignored the official ceremonies of welcome and went straight to church . |
| 22 | She had grown used to the tiny sounds that were so much a part of Seawitch , just as she had grown used to the boat 's continually changing motion . |
| 23 | 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 . |
| 24 | However , as the belief in metaphysical realism declined in the nineteenth century in favour of more nominalist , relativist or generally hesitant views of knowledge , the concept of a liberal education seemed to lose its firm epistemological foundation and become not so much a theory of knowledge as a theory of ignorance . |
| 25 | It 's not so much a reconstruction of image as proof that Shocked 's confidence is growing . |
| 26 | The ten-year programme represents not so much a strategy for growth ; it is more a guess at the government 's ability to rein in the booming provinces of the southern coast and the Yangtze delta . |
| 27 | It is not so much a network of gift-giving as a network of indebtedness . |
| 28 | The point should not be overemphasized , since on occasion this sense of duty was not so much a cause of action but a post hoc justification of it . |
| 29 | This is not so much a matter of transaction costs as of the unpredictability of offer and counter-offer : it moves economics into the realm of game theory , where efficient outcomes can not be taken for granted ( see box ) . |
| 30 | It had become so much a matter of routine that when she answered he came close to putting the phone down before he realized that all he 'd heard was , ‘ Hello . ’ |