Example sentences of "so [adv] a [noun sg] [prep] [noun sg] " 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 | It was n't so much a case of thinking : he looks a lovely chappie . |
| 3 | 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 . |
| 4 | 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 . |
| 5 | 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 . |
| 6 | It 's not so much a lack of generosity — a real miserliness . |
| 7 | 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 . |
| 8 | 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 ) . |
| 9 | 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 . |
| 10 | ‘ 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 . |
| 11 | 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 . |
| 12 | 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 ) . |
| 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 problem of hardware development outpacing software , or vice versa . |
| 15 | 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 . |
| 16 | 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 . |
| 17 | It 's not so much a reconstruction of image as proof that Shocked 's confidence is growing . |
| 18 | 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 . |
| 19 | It is not so much a network of gift-giving as a network of indebtedness . |
| 20 | 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 . |
| 21 | 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 ) . |
| 22 | 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 . ’ |
| 23 | Personally , I am not in favour of mammoth jail sentences except for the deserving few — and that 's not so much a matter of punishment as a means of keeping society free from their future depredations . |
| 24 | Liam Brady 's choice of more or less the side who lost to Falkirk in the Scottish Cup the previous weekend — Rudi Vata was replaced by Brian O'Neil — was not so much a vote of confidence as a challenge to those players to prove they could not be so bad again . |
| 25 | And when we begin to gain , if only the merest glimpse of the deeply ingrained brutalities and prejudices embodied in what was judged to be ‘ right ’ , then we can see more clearly that the Garotter 's Act was not so much a moment of panic which led respectable England off its true course , but a mature expression of the existing social relations — including the self-assumption of the mighty , and their attitudes and actions towards the lower orders and the plebs . |
| 26 | It was not so much a feeling of disquiet as of expectation , almost pleasurable anticipation . |
| 27 | 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 . |
| 28 | Here one suspects that there is not so much a clash of ideology as one of gross distortion . |
| 29 | A dull , cold , rainy day does not literally mean ‘ sadness ’ — it is possible to be happy on such a day — but it is so obviously a metaphor for sadness that when it appears in writing it has become a cliché , intended to trigger a predictable response . |
| 30 | Nevertheless , on the material before the court , it was not necessary to impose so long a term of imprisonment . |