Search results for 'tag:Conversations tag:Conditionals' matching tags 'Conversations' and 'Conditionals'

Re: Conditional Sentence

Avangi — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 02:08:37 GMT

I would have taken a boat if I had known that New York was / is across the river from New Jersey.

In conversation, people often express these "currently existing conditions" in past tense when they're talking about something they did in the past. But when they write it down, they look at it and say, "Hey, wait a minute, New York is still there!" I wouldn't say the past tense is actually incorrect.

- A.

Re: Follow-up to "Nagging conditional problem"

Mr Wordy — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 02:23:40 GMT

Anonymous

If you happen to have money (with/on you), could/would you lend me some? [this is more about present -- if the if-clause is in present tense, can we use the modals 'could' and 'would'? Does the phrase 'happen to have' make any difference here?

Should you have money (with/on you), could/would you lend me some? ["chancy" should -- To me, 'should' here is functionally equal to "if", so the sentence could be read:

If you have money (with/on you), could/would you lend me some?

The first sentence means essentially the same as "...can/will you lend me some?", but "could/would" has the effect of "softening" the request -- making it seem less direct. The use of "happen to have" (as opposed to just "have") makes no difference to the point you're asking about.

In the second sentence there is, to me, no tangible difference in meaning between "should" and "if". However, the version with "should" is more formal (or even slightly old-fashioned), and, in my part of the world, is much less likely to be heard in ordinary conversation. (In fact, in real life, I would in this context usually say "If you have any money...".)

Re: Nagging conditional problem

Cool Breeze — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:54:35 GMT

Marius Hancu

>If you have money, could you lend me some?
This should be using would, as it's about the will of the other person, as well as had, to create the unreal/hypothetical:

Hi all

I see nothing wrong with the above sentence. It's a polite request; could makes it a little more polite than can, at least in theory. In actual conversation very much depends on the tone of voice, of course.

Re: Conditional

Mister Micawber — Fri, 30 May 2008 00:58:59 GMT

.
It is possible that any of them could be uttered in conversation. None of them seem natural or expected. The first two are grammatical and Conditional 1. The third sentence is unacceptable in written English.

I might say. "If I have to call your mother, fathead, you won't get a birthday present tomorrow".

confused about 'would'

New2grammar — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 08:10:33 GMT

I know 'would' carries many meanings. My problem is sometimes I find it difficult to tell which meaning the speaker uses. I think I understand its hypothetical usage, and in some contexts, its politeness usage. Below is a post that has several woulds I have trouble interpreting. I also copied a post on would by CalifJim for reference.

Your analysis is good. Context will determine if you're using the expression as an excuse to break off what you're doing. If you're calling the people you expect to meet, then you would (1)tell them the truth. You can say, "I'll be about five minutes late," or "I may be a little late." If you're speaking to someone who is about to make you late for an appointment, the expression would(2) mean, "Hey, I'm gonna be late if I don't split right now!" If you just say, "I'm gonna be late," you probably would(3) have already tipped the person off that you would(4) need to end the conversation soon, and as you suggest, you would(5) still expect to be on time if you left immediately.

1) I don't thing politeness is the intended meaning here. To my ear, it carries the meaning of preference.

2) would here means possible? I have zero confidence in this one.

3) it doesn't look like hypothetical usage to me because the if clause is in present tense

4) and 5) should follow the same reasoning for #3, whatever that is.

Please help! Thanks in advance!

CalifJim's explanation on would
Yes. I thought maybe that's what you were referring to.
would in an if clause is possible when the would or the entire if-clause is part of a formula of politeness. if you would be so kind is a typical example of if with would in a "politeness phrase". This formula is equivalent to please. This sort of if-clause does not even have to be classified as a true conditional even though it contains the word if.

The phrase would like as a polite way of saying want, and it too can appear in an if-clause. Note that the idiom would like counts as a present tense for purposes of tense combinations. That is, it may combine with the imperative or the future. The idiom would rather has the same property.

If you would like to have dinner with us tomorrow, please call and let us know before noon.
I'm sure that if he'd like to go with us, he'll tell us. (If he would like to go, he will tell us.)
If you'd rather wait until tomorrow, [just say so / I'll understand].

if-clauses that are part of an indirect question structure are also exempt from the rule about combining if and would:

I wonder if he would object to this procedure.
I don't know if I would agree.
We had not decided if we would go along with the plan.

With the exception of the indirect question structure, which is quite common, these are just a very, very small number of situations where if and would occur in the same clause. The main rule for 99.99% of cases is 'never' to place if and would together!

Re: if clause

Goodman — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:46:26 GMT

I believe we have many discussions on the conditional questions and if I remember correctly, we never come to a unanimous agreement, simply because of interpretation differences and how the question is structured. Reading this one, I agree with Marious on and also from my angle, is possilbe as well in a casual conversation, I am not really particularly confortable with the first part of the question. Decently- doesn't seem to work too well with "get ready" to my ear.

If we ...........ready for the YDS exam decently, we .........at least two and a half hours a day for reading questions.

a)were to get / should have spared

b)got / would have spared

c)are to get / had spared

d)have gotten / would spare

e)have to get / must have spared

Re: Mixed conditional

Teleostomi — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 05:55:27 GMT

Wow CalifJim, thanks to you I now completely understand the usage! I owe you a lot!

I would say that these became mixed conditionals through the substitution of were for had been, which is a common substitution, especially in everyday conversation. I would say that the 'original' thoughts and meanings were:

If you had been paying attention, it wouldn't have happened.
If she had been working for him, he would have protected her.

(The versions with were-substitutions have the same meanings as the 'originals'.)

Oh, both versions are virtually the same in meaning! Is it also common in BrEn?

Re: "hadn't have been..., ...wouldn't have had to have..."

CalifJim — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 05:51:43 GMT

The first one seems wrong at the end. Let me change it a little. Make another post if you still have a question about that last bit of the first one, OK?

1 "If it hadn't have been for the accident, I wouldn't have had to report late for work."

2 "If it wouldn't have been for the accident, I would have been on time."

These are both used in casual conversation, though the patterns in the if-clauses are not the standard forms for the "Third Conditional". In your place I would learn to recognize them, but I would not imitate them.
To give a realistic imitation of how these are actually said, more contractions need to be shown.

If it hadn't've been for the accident, I wouldn't've had to report late for work.
If it wouldn't've been for the accident, I would've been on time.

Since this is almost entirely a spoken, not a written, pattern, less schooled natives wouldn't even know how to spell them, and might write them as If it hadn't of been ... and If it wouldn't of been ... because the sound of 've and of are the same.

The standard (spoken or written) versions are:

If it hadn't been for the accident, I wouldn't have had to report late for work
If it hadn't been for the accident, I would've been on time.

CJ

Re: Mixed conditional

CalifJim — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 20:43:11 GMT

I would say that these became mixed conditionals through the substitution of were for had been, which is a common substitution, especially in everyday conversation. I would say that the 'original' thoughts and meanings were:

If you had been paying attention, it wouldn't have happened.
If she had been working for him, he would have protected her.

(The versions with were-substitutions have the same meanings as the 'originals'.)
__________

As for the substitution of the simple past:

If you paid attention, it wouldn't have happened.

My personal feeling here is that to get the same meaning as the original, it should be If you had paid attention, it wouldn't have happened. This one usually refers to an individual act of paying attention, whereas the one with the progressive usually refers to a period of time filled by the activity of continuous attention-paying.

Compare:
The fire alarm went off, and believe me, when an excited voice came over the speaker system, everyone paid attention. (Everyone immediately became alert to the situation.)
There was a ladder against the wall, but I wasn't paying attention, so I ran right into it and banged my head. (I was not continuously alert to such dangers as I was walking.)
__________

If she worked for him, he would have protected her.

Again, my feeling is that this should be If she had worked for him, he would have protected her. This example is a little different from the 'pay attention' example. I hear the difference like this:

Progressive: If she had been working for him (at that time), he would have protected her (then) (at the same time).
Simple: If she had (ever) worked for him (at any time before that), he would have protected her (either while she had been working for him or after she had finished working for him).

CJ

Re: subjunctive or past conditional

Goodman — Mon, 07 May 2007 23:03:25 GMT

Hi Bokeh,

Becasue of your reply, it made me take a second look at the original question. I also did some research and found this paper written on the subject of Semantic Composition of Subjunctive Conditionals by Michela Ippolito of MIT/TÃ¼bingen University. I am not completely sure if I understood all thwt he wrote, but I do agree whole-heartedly with his view from what I understood. It's obvious that there are several subjunctive moods and conditionals discussed in great legnth which was exactly the reason causing the confusions on this thread. I find it absoulutely useful so I've extracted a small portion which I beleive was related the posted question.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=type+of+subjunctive

michela@alum.mit.edu

3. The Semantic Analysis of Subjunctive Conditionals

In answering the question of what the correct semantic analysis of subjunctive

conditionals is we will raise and answer the following questions too: (1) What is the

difference between indicative an subjunctive conditionals? (2) What is the role of the

past morphology in the composition of the meaning of a subjunctive conditional? (3)

What is the contribution of the second layer of past to the meaning of subjunctive

conditionals? As Iatridou observes, the past morphology in subjunctive conditionals is

not interpreted temporally, as the event of playing baseball in example (2) is supposed

to take place in the future (tomorrow). What follows in this paper is inspired by her

work and by the intuition behind it, i.e. that the temporal morphology we see in modal

constructions actively contributes to the construction of the modal meaning. However,

I depart from her idea that tense morphology has a âcore meaningâ that can apply to

different kinds of entities (i.e. her idea that if it applies to times, it is interpreted

temporally; if it applies to worlds, then it is interpreted modally). My claim is that

tense (aspectual) morphology has a single, definite interpretation: the temporal

(aspectual) one. The way tense morphology contributes to the composition of modal

meaning is by being interpreted in different positions in the structure of a modal

sentence, i.e. either in the restriction or in the nuclear scope of the modal operator.

Recall that I am arguing that accessibility relations are of type <s<i<st>> (where i is

the type for times and s the type for worlds): the notion of accessible world is relative

not only to a world but also to a time so that a world will be accessible if it satisfies

certain conditions with respect to an evaluation world and an evaluation time. The

past that we see in subjunctive conditionals such as If Charlie played baseball

tomorrow, we would lose the game is the morphological realization of a perfect

operator interpreted in the modal domain. I will develop an analysis of the meaning of

subjunctive conditionals and show how it solves the puzzle of the presupposition

projection for subjunctive conditionals discussed in Heim 1992; finally, I will answer

the three questions I raised above.

3.1 Felicity Conditions for Conditionals

Recall what the puzzle was. The antecedent of a subjunctive conditional can be

inconsistent with the common ground, and consequently, the set of worlds the modal

operator quantifies over cannot be restricted to the worlds in the context set (the

epistemically accessible worlds) (see (19) below). Furthermore, this set cannot be the

empty context (W) either because, if it were, we would expect conditionals with

antecedents with presuppositions to be infelicitous since the modal base does not have

the right entailments. However, this is incorrect: subjunctive conditionals whose

antecedents have presuppositions are felicitous, which means that the antecedentâs

presuppositions can be entailed by the modal base (cf. (20)). In fact, they must (cf.

(21)).

(19) Jack is dead. If he were alive, he would come to the ceremony.

(20) Jack smokes. If he quit smoking tomorrow, which he wonât, he would run

the marathon.

(21) Jack quit smoking last year. If he quit smoking tomorrow, he would run

the marathon.

Heim 1992 concluded that the only way to reconcile these two requirements of

subjunctive conditionals is to stipulate that the modal base is neither the set of

epistemically accessible worlds (the main context) nor the totally empty modal base

W, but the (largest) set of worlds obtained by suspending all the speakerâs

assumptions except the presuppositions of the antecedent, which then remain entailed.

However, I showed above that this stipulation does not work for all subjunctive

conditionals: in particular, it does not account for the difference between one-past

subjunctive conditionals and mismatched two-pasts subjunctive conditionals, as

shown below.

(22) Jack died last year.

a. #If he came to the ceremony tomorrow, he would be proud of Sally.

b. If he had come to the graduation tomorrow, he would have been proud

of Sally.

We are back where we were: how is the set of worlds to which modal operators apply

selected? Clearly, the felicity conditions for indicative, one-past and two-pasts

subjunctive conditionals are all different. But what is the difference and how is the

difference determined?

It seems correct to hold that for a sentence to be felicitously uttered in the

context c, c must entail the presuppositions of . In the common ground theory of

presuppositions developed by Stalnaker (1973, 1974, 1975), the common ground is

the set of all the propositions known or assumed to be true by all the participants in

the conversation, and the context set is the set of worlds where all the propositions in

the common ground are true. Assertions are meant to update the common ground. If

the assertion is made and accepted, the common ground expands and the context set

shrinks. Thus, if a sentence presupposes p, then asserting requires that the

common ground entail p, i.e. it requires that the speaker assume that it is true in the

common ground that p, modulo accommodation.10 It is explicit in Heimâs context

change semantics (and implicit in Stalnakerâs idea of a derived context) that a clause

(that is to say, the structural description of a clause at the level of Logical Form) is not

always evaluated with respect to the context of utterance: the context with respect to

which a structure is evaluated depends on the level of embedding of the clause, the

most unembedded clause being interpreted with respect to the main (utterance)

context. We can then reformulate the principle above: what is responsible for the

felicity of a sentence is not whether its presuppositions are entailed by the utterance

context but whether they are entailed by the evaluation context (which may be

identical to the utterance time in some cases). Call this principle PREP.

10 Stalnaker (1972, 1973, 1974, 1978, 1988, 1998). Kartunnen (1974), Lewis (1979), Heim (1982,

1983, 1992), Thomason (1990) and von Fintel (2000) also contributed important work in the tradition

of the common ground theory of presuppositions.

3.2 What Looks Like Past is Perfect

I propose that the past morphology we see in subjunctive conditionals in English is

the morphological realization of a perfect operator. The English perfect, and

especially the present perfect, has raised a lot of interest in the linguistic literature

because of the properties that distinguish it from both the present and the simple past

tense. McCoard (1978) offers a survey of possible theories of the perfect: the current

relevance theory, the indefinite past theory, the embedded past theory and, finally, the

theory that he argues to be the best, the Extended Now theory. Very briefly, according

11 The claim that the presuppositions of the antecedent of a conditional have to be entailed by the

context is a standard claim of a dynamic approach to meaning (Heim 1992). However, we will see later

that the issue is more intricate and I will have more to say on this topic later on in the paper.