Home: Forum: Best of 2004: So/Too Adjective a Noun

So/Too Adjective a Noun

saya   Thursday, December 16, 2004, 00:44 GMT

Hello Everyone! I'm an English learner and now get stuck with a question. <Sample sentences> (1) Mike is so good a teacher. (2) Ann is too stupid a student to learn math. Should I take "good" and "stupid" as subject complements or as noun modifiers? I was wondering if someone would explain the syntactic constructions of these.

Easterner   Thursday, December 16, 2004, 10:22 GMT

The first one should be: "Mike is such a good teacher". "So" is used if the predicate consists of an adjective only, not a noun phrase, like in "This is SO good". The second sentence seems right to me.