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I have seen various sentences like this:

The availability of two reasonably complete mammalian genomes is of great help to gene finders. - The New York Times

I do my utmost to dress the actors very differently from one another, and this is of great help, both in adding beauty and in facilitating the understanding of the plot. - Encyclopedia Britannica

I looked into this thread and came to know about the meaning of such construction and also came to know that not all nouns are allowed in place of "help" in such construction and mostly in that matter this construction is kind of "an idiom".

In A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language by Quirk et al on page no 732 Section 10.11 I found some little discussion about this construction:

Some prepositional phrases are semantically similar to adjective or noun phrases functioning as complement:

That is of no importance.

Furthermore, unlike clear instances of obligatory adjuncts, they can be used as complementation for copular verbs other than BE, a characteristic of adjective phrases functioning as subject complement:

That seems of no importance.

Now I tried to change the modifier before "help", like instead of "great" I tried to use "a lot of" but came to know that the following is ungrammatical:

He would be of a lot of help. [INCORRECT]
He would be a lot of help. [CORRECT]

Now my question is why "He is of great help" is correct but not "He is of a lot of help"?

Laurel
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Man_From_India
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  • You could argue that they are both grammatical, but what is “of a lot of help” supposed to communicate? – Lawrence May 23 '21 at 04:49
  • @Lawrence just tried to relapce "great" with another similar modifier. – Man_From_India May 23 '21 at 04:56
  • To say someone is 'of help' is a rather formal usage, while 'a lot of' is informal - that's why they sound odd together. – Kate Bunting May 23 '21 at 07:49
  • @KateBunting it makes sense that an informal and a formal expression don't go hand in hand. But "a lot of" does appear in formal context, and so does very formal literally expression "of afternoon" etc. in informal context. Aren't they? But they don't seem completely wrong or incorrect, which is the case here. – Man_From_India May 23 '21 at 08:18
  • A great deal of or a large amount of would be used in formal language rather than a lot of. I don't understand what you mean by of afternoon. – Kate Bunting May 23 '21 at 08:28
  • @KateBunting "of afternoon" is a very formal term and is only confined in literature these days. But if we use it in informal conext, it might sound off but it won't seem utterly incorrect. But in our case of "be of a lot of help" does sound completely wrong. And to me it seems like it is wrong on syntactic ground, though I might be wrong but it's just my guess. – Man_From_India May 23 '21 at 08:32
  • But does "be of a great deal of help" or "be a large amount of help" work? They still sound wrong to me. – Man_From_India May 23 '21 at 08:34
  • Since these are idioms, can you accept also that one-word modifiers are expected here? He is of great help. He is of little help. He is of no help. And/or that double ofs don't work? _He is of* a lot of help._ _He is of* oodles of help._ – Tinfoil Hat May 23 '21 at 14:40
  • The strings 'powerful computer' and 'strong tea' are collocates: they occur more often than random acceptable pairings (like 'striped computer', 'exceptional tea', 'acceptable tea'). But any sensible adjective can be used before tea, computer. However 'is of great help' is not so susceptible to variation. As has been said, there is the inflexibility associated with an idiom. In fact, 'of great/little/no ...' help; 'not be of much/any ... help' (with negative polarity items) are fixed phrases, arguably colligations (needed to maintain grammaticality) ... – Edwin Ashworth May 24 '22 at 14:04
  • while 'of just a little' / 'of a lot of' ... help are unacceptable. – Edwin Ashworth May 24 '22 at 14:04

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