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A new English determinative is being born: "a couple" (e.g., a couple years, a couple things, a couple people). #linguistics #diachronic
It's clearly evolving out of the NP frame "a couple of" + plural NP and may be influenced by the determinative "a few". Even if you don't accept "a couple people", you might find "a couple hundred" works like a gateway drug.
Here's the frequency of "a couple of" + N sinc the 1990s. The first line is the number of tokens, the second is the size of the subcorpus in millions, and the third is the frequency per million words. Not much happening here. 
