Another good find!

It's a pity that neither Ora's nor Erika's paper looks at the history of 'too [adj] (of) a [noun]'. From the point of view of analysis, much seems to depend on whether or not 'too [adj] a [noun]' is an ellipsis for 'too [adj] of a [noun]'.

(For instance, if it is an ellipsis, we can then discount the admittedly remote possibility that 'a' isn't an indefinite article at all, but a Teutonic prefix of some kind, or a truncation of 'of'. Though the Dutch version in Ora's paper seems in any case to rule this out.)

I haven't yet been able to find either version in a Middle English text.

How is the 'of' version regarded in the US? It's not used in standard BrE, but I'd hesitate to say it doesn't lurk in a dialect somewhere. The googles seem all to relate to 'colloquial/non-standard' contexts. Ora says that 'in some (more colloquial) dialects fronting of the extended AP triggers of-insertion'; but not whether of-insertion is an older form retained in dialect, or a new form that has developed in dialect.

The latter would be the more interesting case (hypercorrection? or parallelism with other 'of a' structures?); the former more helpful...

MrP