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If the first half of the sentence is a hypothetical scenario and other half is the postulated outcome, should one use "had been" or "was"?
Had been is the choice.
Pragmatically, (i) "had been" obviates any controversy about whether the subjunctive is needed and (ii) the past perfect is used for context and background.
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If the first half of the sentence is a hypothetical scenario and other half is the postulated outcome, should one use "had been" or "was"?
Consider:
If I had eaten the last cookie, I would remember doing so.
If I ate the last cookie, I would remember doing so.
In American English, "ate" is the more colloquial version, but the ...
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If the first half of the sentence is a hypothetical scenario and other half is the postulated outcome, should one use "had been" or "was"?
Fools rush in…
…but in my opinion neither sentence is grammatically correct. It seems to me that the problem here is the tense (or more generally timing) of the hypothetical conditions, and perhaps ...
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A linking verb or a part of the verb phrase?
First of all, in both cases, were is a part (in fact, head) of the verb phrase. The question then becomes: what is its complement, a past participle (i.e. a verb) or an adjective?
There are a couple ...
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