ell.stackexchange.com:
(1) How many times an increase was it?
The structure of (1) is very interesting to me.
I want to find out whether I understood it correctly or not.
For this purpose, I made up some analogous sentences.
(2) How many story a building is it?
(3) How many person a tent is it?
(4) How many core a processor is it?
Are (2), (3) and (4) also correct?
If not, then why are they not correct, whereas (1) is?
All the answers so far are (in my opinion) correct, but the OP’s confusion results from a difference between what an adjectival phrase can accomplish in English, and what a copula can. You can say:
It is a big tent.
or
This tent is big.
but while it is perfectly correct to say:
It is a five-person tent.
it is wrong, or at least heavily discouraged, to say:
This tent is five-person.
Therefore asking “how many person [or persons or people] is this tent?” is not done by native speakers.
Ditto with cores of a processor. In the case of stories of a building, you absolutely can say:
This building is five stories.
because a building consists almost entirely of its stories. Although it may also have basements and subbasements, parking, curtilage, and so on, those are not considered essential to its “buildingness”. There are buildings without basements, but there are no zero-story buildings.
Of course a tent must hold at least one person and a CPU needs a core, but it also must have other things (a roof, an ALU), so we say they “have” rather than “are” these things.
How many x:
How many is always followed by a plural noun. That is actually a grammar point:
(2) How many story a building is it?
(3) How many person a tent is it?
(4) How many core a processor is it?
See an idiomatic version of 2, 3 and 4.
(2) How many storeys does the building have? [to have x number of storeys]
(3) How many persons/people fit in that tent? [to fit in a tent]
(4) How many cores does the CPU have? [to have a core]
That said, adjectivally, one can do this:
Another idiomatic version of the question using the verb BE:
How many stories [alt. spelling storeys] is the building?
How many weeks is the course?
How many years was the (prison) sentence?
How many feet is the tape measure?
How many processors is that new CPU?
How many pages is the book?
This is an informal, conversational construction.
P.S. Why don't your versions work, which have a structure like "how many page a book"? Because phrases of the "how many page" variety do not resolve to anything grammatical. Such a phrase does not yield the adjective of degree required for constructions like "how big a dog was it?". Nor do they yield the cardinal number required by constructions like "How many years was the sentence?"
1 is not common or particularly idiomatic; there are no Google hits for the question outside of Stack Exchange; but it doesn't seem ungrammatical. To me, 2, 3, and 4 seem worse.
It relates to which verb is most natural to use for describing something.
The building has three stories.
The tent holds three people. (or accommodates, is big enough for, etc.)
The processor has three cores. (or contains, etc.)
So you'd ask
How many stories does the building have?
How many people does the tent hold?
How many cores does the processor have?
In contrast, you'd say
It's three times something else
Or you could say (although I don't think it's very elegant, and people often get confused by statements like this):
It's a three-times increase (or three times increase, or three-fold increase)
So, while it's uncommon, you could say
How many times an increase is it? (or was it)
But I wouldn't recommend it. As the answer you link says, it's not a particularly elegant way to ask. People often get confused whether "increased three times" means by an additional three (hence four times bigger than the original) or three times bigger. You would do better to ask something like:
How big an increase was it?
Or
What did it increase by?
And then someone can explain it as clearly as possible.
