grammar - Why can we add "a number of" before nouns?


In the following sentence:



The city is populated by many people.



"many" can be replaced by something like "a great number of" (let us leave the perceived differences between the meanings of these two modifiers out of discussion):



The city is populated by a great number of people.



I understand that this replacement does not change the object "populating the city" from the original "people" to a "number", but rather shows the ability of expressions in the form "[numeral] of" to provide information about the quantity of nouns they modify.


Is this ability due to some special qualities of nouns such as "number", "quantity", "fraction", &c., or is it just one usage of the preposition "of"?




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