Learn English – “I gave it a lot of thought” vs. “I thought about it a lot”

grammarsentencesyntactic-analysis

I've heard the following expression often and I have a few questions.
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I gave it a lot of thought.

  1. What is "it"? Is it dummy or something you are referring to? Does it sound differnt from "I thought about it a lot"?

  2. If it is something you are referring to (an idea, present, plan to buy a car, etc.), how can you give your thought to it as if they could receive your thought?

  3. If you change the above into a passive voice sentence, which one of the following two would it be?

"It was given a lot of thought" or "A lot of thought was given to it".

If you Google them, you get 184,000 hits for "I gave it a lot of thought", but you get 413,000 for "It was given a lot of thought", and 301,000 hits for "A lot of thought was given to it"

  1. Even though there are differences in the number of hits, I would still prefer using "I gave it a lot of thought" to using the 2 passive forms. Is there any difference in their meanings?

Best Answer

To me, it is referring in this idiom: the question, problem or issue. Gave means devoted or assigned.

Neither passive feels very comfortable to me, but I prefer the second (with the thought as the subject).

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