Re: "Carol was one of my sister's best friend." Still friends?

CalifJim — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 22:12:10 GMT

Since the past tense doesn't imply anything about now, would you find those past tenses I used ok?

Of course! You can tell us whatever you want. You can tell us about something in the past or you can tell us about something in the present, or whatever combinations you'd like. Just don't expect us to infer by logic from the grammar anything about the past from the present tense statements or about the present from the past tense statements! (As I argued by analogy earlier, this would be like inferring things about Spain from statements about France.) We may, however, infer these things in other ways -- from what we see with our own eyes, from other information we already know, and so on. But this sort of inference is not inference from grammatical structure.

CJ

Re: would rather

CalifJim — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 17:16:19 GMT

Hela,

I can't speak for other people! I don't know why they would use present (subj) instead of past! Maybe the idiom itself should be considered as only weakly governing the following verb, similar to "if". Recall that "would rather" has a sort of double identity: It is an idiom for "prefer" (with a present tense meaning), and it contains "would", which gives it the flavor of "would prefer".
On the one hand, we have "I prefer that he stay"; on the other hand, we have "I would prefer it if he stayed".

The analogy with "if" is not completely parallel, but you may find some explanatory power in it:

If I stay, I will fall asleep.
If I stayed, I would fall asleep.

If not, ignore the examples with "if"!

CJ

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Re: "Carol was one of my sister's best friend." Still friends?

Re: would rather