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Is it grammatically correct to say "It took me five hours travelling to the US"?

Most people would say "It took me five hours to travel to the US." I wonder if the infinitive is always the only option, or if a present participle is possible as well.

RegDwigнt
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user85982
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  • Expressions such as 'It took me 4-5 hours doing those' are quite common on the internet. (180 000 Google hits for "took me" + "hours doing") However, it does sound rather sloppy to my ears, and I'd concur with Marv Mills' suggestions. 'It cost me $250 buying that' likewise sounds off, though 'It gave me great pleasure touring the Amazon' sounds perhaps as acceptable as the alternative. – Edwin Ashworth Jul 23 '14 at 13:45
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    @Edwin I’m not sure it sounds sloppy to my ear—but it sounds like there’s an implied comma missing if written like that. I find “It took me five hours, travelling to the US” perfectly fine. The pause and intonation when spoken makes it clear that travelling to the US is a typical repeated subject. If read as a sentence with no comma, i.e., with the same intonation as “It took me five hours to travel to the US”, the sentence becomes not just sloppy, but completely ungrammatical to me. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 23 '14 at 15:20
  • @Janus There seem to be more relevant internet examples (though admittedly not enough to be totally convincing) for 'It gave me great pleasure being / doing / going / having ...' than the commaed or dashed versions. While I'd agree that the commaed version must be grammatically acceptable, I've certainly heard the pauseless construction used. This is probably an area where an 'acceptability shift' is occurring. – Edwin Ashworth Jul 23 '14 at 16:28
  • Something like "It took me five hours walking" is unobjectionable, but it's saying something different: you're expressing the method by which it takes 5 hours. You usually say "it takes so long by X method" (and sometimes you can omit "by") or "it takes so long to X". – Stuart F May 06 '21 at 23:14

3 Answers3

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The It in the sentence here is the dummy subject it inserted by Extraposition.
That means the clause in question is a subject complement that's been displaced.

  • Travelling to the US took me five hours.
  • To travel to the US took me five hours.

Notice that without extraposition the infinitive subject seems awkward, but the gerund sounds fine. That's why most of the complements that are extraposed are infinitives, not gerunds. But it's perfectly OK to extrapose gerunds if you want to -- it's just that there's not much need.

John Lawler
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I cannot define the rules, but the first statement implies "[doing something] took five hours [whilst you were] travelling to the US". If you want to use "travelling " you should say "Travelling to the US took me five hours".

i.e. "It took me five hours to [do something]" or "[doing something] took me five hours".

Marv Mills
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Idiomatically, the standard format is...

It took [1] (some amount of time/effort) to (do something) | before (something happened), etc.

1 an optional "patient" noun/pronoun may appear here (the person who made the effort).

As a native speaker, my instinct is to interpret five hours travelling to the US as a complete noun clause representing some amount of time/effort, so I still expect another clause following that to tell me the final outcome achieved by that effort. For example,...

It took me five hours travelling to the US to attend my son's wedding
It took me five hours travelling to the US before I finally got used to being in a plane

As OP says, for the specific context, "It took me five hours to travel to the US" is far more likely phrasing - precisely because the "final outcome" (I travelled to the US) is clearly identifiable.

FumbleFingers
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