New answers tagged conditionals
0
They are probably conditionals because there probably is a condition. I say this as “if” can be replaced by “on condition that”.
Whether an obvious condition is a condition is a philosophical question – compare:
“If you are not killed on the mission, meet me in London” with
“If you are killed on the mission, meet me in London”
The latter is impossible and ...
1
Deontic mode, not epistemic mode
These are polite requests, not conditioned predictions.
In particular, they use modal verbs in the deontic mode of obligations and permissions, not the epistemic mode of possibilities and predictions. Ditch the “if” part and nothing changes in the formulation.
“Would you get us some coffee?” is just the past-tense version of ...
1
I did not think A was ambiguous, but I know the subject well enough to not notice.
I do, however, think you have a point and option B eliminates any possibility that a novice might misconstrue the wording in the way you foresee.
The case for case is really just opinion in most cases. If seems to be more clear in this case though, and simple phrasing "...
0
Native speakers don’t typically consider conditional class numbers when constructing conditionals. These are simply categorisations - with categories that can change from one grammar to another. As such, this answer will focus on the content and interpretation of your sentence of interest:
If Picasso could judge his creations as he produced them, he would ...
1
If we knew that it ___ raining, we would also know that the street ___ wet.
This can be either a hypothetical or irrealis conditional, because the past tense knew can refer to simple past
"Since it was raining, the street would be wet. So if we knew then that it was raining, we would also know that the street was wet. Inspector Grimes, did we know ...
1
These Google 5-gram results for "we knew that it was" / "we knew that it were" / "we knew that he was" / "we knew that he were" show no relevant results for the variants using 'were' (though of course many false positives not involving if-clauses elsewhere. These are examples of the string "if we knew that it was&...
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I think it's grammatically correct to have a present tense conditional before a past tense statement, for example:
If you are hungry, you should have packed some food.
However in the example you give there's a semantic problem. Since the opportunity to pass the test has passed, what the person wants now if of no consequence, what matters is what they ...
-1
British English has 0-3rd + mixed and separate conditionals. American English tends to be less formal does not separate it to such a degree. Although, “would” is normally attributed to less of a possibility (2nd Con.) In your example, you can substitute “will” for “would” and get the exact same meaning that she will likely be able to tell the difference ...
2
Sure, in the sense that if can mean given that (OED entry above), if can point to a condition presently being met, in addition to a condition that might be met.
To show this, I had a little fun in the Hansard corpus for British Parliament finding examples of "if we all agree" that are based on situations where the fact isn't under dispute or ...
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