Can I list countable nouns to be done after "do much"?

Question

Examples:

I can't do much for that.
There is too much to be done.

At first I assumed there is an omitted noun after "much"? But the possible applicable nouns I knew, such as "works", or "anti-measures", are countable. So if one of them is the omitted noun, the phrase should be "do many" instead.

So I thought "much" should be an adverb modifying the verb "do". But in this case, the construction "too much to be done" seemed strange, and I'm not exactly sure whether it is grammatical.

Looking up at the dictionary, it says that "much" is also a noun itself, which should be the case in these examples. But still, I can't seem to get rid of the implications of the two above explanations.

The question

If it continues to say exactly how much is to be done, it's likely it would list something countable, say task A and task B. So in this example:

There is too much to be done, such as task A and task B.

Is it correct, and natural to native speakers?

Under my first understanding of "do much", the adjective "much" doesn't match the noun "task". Under my second understanding, the listed tasks sound unrelated to "much to be done". Both of them seemed weird to me.

And this expression hides the problem a bit:

There is too much to be done, such as doing task A and task B.

But to me it's likely just an unnecessary obfuscation.

And if it is wrong or not natural, how to express this idea correctly?

Answer 1

You use much here because there isn't any noun after the word much.

For example, the following would also be correct:

There are too many tasks to be done, such as task A and task B.

However, now there are things we can explicitly count, namely tasks.

Without the noun, we can't count it and we can also see that we use the singular form of the verb to be, namely the form is.

Answer 2

"Much" is a degree determiner which typically occurs in NPs with non-count nouns, as in I don't have much money where "much" is determiner and "money" is head of the NP. But in your examples, it's a 'fused determiner-head' where the (unstated) head of the NP is 'fused' with determiner "much" so that that the single word "much" is understood as "much x". Your first example is thus interpreted as I can't do much x for that, where the value of "x" is derived from the context, e.g. I can't do much good for that.

The same applies with your other example: There is too much to be done is interpreted as There is too much x to be done, where the value of "x" is again derivable from the context, e.g. There is too much work to be done.