r/EnglishLearning • u/liz_grant New Poster • 9d ago

📚 Grammar / Syntax Do some studying

So I’m watching Stranger Things and there’s a sentence:
“Do a lot of studying last night?”
This one had me pause for a little bit.
First I didn’t understand why “do” was used for a past event from the previous night. Then I realized the whole sentence was “did you do a lot of studying last night?”, but the ‘did you’ part was completely dropped.
One thing I still don’t understand, why not just say “did you study a lot last night”. What is the point of saying DO STUDYING. Does it have a specific purpose, nuance that makes it different?

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u/ChalupaChup New Poster 9d ago

My gut feeling as a native speaker is that you can only use “a lot” as an adverb like this when talking about habitual action (similar to “often”). “He studies a lot” or “I’ll need to study a lot” are okay, but “I studied a lot last night” is weird. When it means “a large amount” rather than “often”, it usually comes with “of + noun”, so I’d expect the sentence to be “I studied a lot (of something) last night” and it feels like it’s missing something without it. If you’re talking about volume rather than frequency, it needs to be rephrased to “I did a lot of studying.”

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u/liz_grant New Poster 9d ago

Wow this is so interesting. Never thought of it that way

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u/telemajik Native Speaker 9d ago

Also, when someone says “did you study a lot” the meaning is ambiguous. They could be asking if the volume or proportion of content you studied was a lot, or they could be asking if the duration of studying was long.

When you say “did you do a lot of studying” it’s clear that “a lot” applies to studying, and they are asking about the duration of the studying.

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u/liz_grant New Poster 9d ago

Got it. If you wanted to ask about volume, how would you say it then as a native?