Languages & Linguistics
Second Conditional
The second conditional is a grammatical structure used to talk about hypothetical or unreal situations in the present or future. It is formed by using the past simple tense in the if-clause and the modal verb "would" plus the base form of the verb in the main clause. This conditional is often used to express wishes, advice, or polite requests.
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7 Key excerpts on "Second Conditional"
eBook - PDFWho Climbs the Grammar-Tree
[leaves for David Reibel]
- Rosemarie Tracy(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
But from a broader perspective, such as is given by Situational Grammar, it appears that verb forms are determined by the kind of situation they designate, and that this in turn is a function of the text-world in force for the particular (stage of the) discourse. What we might call a 'Conditional situation 1 stems from a text-world which is designated so as to be distinct from the current immediate situation or any of the historical situations leading up to it. This is a common text-world type for all hypothetical, imaginary, fictitious or fantastic situations, but what distinguishes a conditional situation from the more narrative types of imaginary world is the fact that a science-fiction story or a fairy tale, for instance, will normally remain 'inside 1 its world and can therefore use ordinary narrative tenses etc. The conditional situa-tion, on the other hand, has almost always a parallel relationship with the 'actual 1 world, and is constantly in comparison with it. We have so far distinguished two kinds of uses for the form would: an independent use, in which it is in some sense the Past or Remote form of will (e.g. (30) and (31) above); and a dependent use, either the Conditional construction (e.g. (32), (33) and (35)) or Reported speech (e.g. (34) above). In both of the dependent types, there is a sequence of tenses rule in English, though with several permissible variations. I shall start with the dependent Condi-tional construction. As set out above, the Conditional partakes of a hypothetical text-world which is in constant comparison with the world around it (itself a text-world like any other). This is actually effected as follows: the i/-clause delineate the hypothetical world, which is, in textual terms, embedded in the text-world already delineated for the containing discourse.
- Irina B. Khlebnikova(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Thus, the sentences formally coincide: the real conditional construc-tion, transformed onto the plane of the past in accordance with the tem-poral context, and the unreal construction of type I. Such cases are es-pecially characteristic of inner monologue. The homonymous future II -conditional I (would speak) are the center for the neutralization of this opposition, since the subjunctive I (or past indicative) is included in this process only in the aggregate with the conditional I (or future II) when either the future from the viewpoint of the past, or unreal action, is being expressed. The boundary between the future viewed from the past and the con-ditional mood is always a topic of controversy, and not only among students of English. It is well known that an analogous phenomenon in French provokes differing interpretations. Thus, G. Guillame con- 50 siders the French conditionnel (9) to be the hypothetical future on the grounds that if forms are homonymous, one may not look for different categories in them. However, homonymy between different categorial forms is a frequent phenomenon in modern languages, and this must be taken into account. As far as English is concerned, we can scarcely deny such a clear indication of the distinction between the future n and the conditional (besides their different categorial meanings) as the widespread occurrence of the perfect series in the conditional and its virtual absence in the future II. The future II and the conditional are often confused due to the lack of criteria for differentiating between homonymy and polysemy. In all languages, if there is a future viewed from the past, then there is a conditional, into which the aforemen-tioned future passes.
- Paul Kroeger(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Language Science Press(Publisher)
19 Conditionals of the conditional form. Tis is of course the same distinction that we were led to in the previous chapter in our discussion of causation. We will argue that the standard conditionals in (2) involve a truth-conditional usage, whereas the rele-vance conditionals in (3) involve a speech act usage. Te factual and concessive conditionals in (4–6) are harder to classify. 19.3 Degrees of hypotheticality One widely discussed property of standard conditionals is that they can be used to express varying degrees of hypotheticality, 8 refecting the speaker’s judgment as to how likely it is that the antecedent is actually true. In languages where verbs are infected for tense and/or mood, verbal morphology is o fen used to signal these distinctions. However, other kinds of marking are also found, as illustrated below; and in some languages this distinction is not grammatically marked at all, but is determined entirely by contextual clues. As a number of authors have noted, there is a cross-linguistic tendency for the antecedent to be interpreted as more hypothetical (less certain) when it is stated in the past tense than in present tense. However, tense marking also serves to indicate the actual time frame of the described event. (See Chapter 21 for a detailed discussion of tense marking.) For this reason, there is generally no one-to-one correlation between tense and degree of hypotheticality. Some English examples are presented in (10–12). (10) a. If Bill is your uncle, then you must know his daughter Margaret. b. If David was your thesis advisor, then he knows your work pre ty well. c. If Susan wins the election, she will become the mayor of Des Moines. d. Results have not yet been announced, but if Susan won the election, the current mayor will have to fnd a new job. e. “It would make it more important if that be the case,” he [Ralph Nader] said yesterday.
- Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible, Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The following sentences are arranged in Givón (1995: 136) from higher to lower possibility (or, degree of certainty): (4) What will you do if I tell you that... What would you do if I told you that... What would you do if I were to tell you that ... What would you have done if I had told you that ... In addition, in each of the above cases, the degree of certainty can be lowered by using modal verbs in the appropriate tense-aspect-mood form in the apodosis, cf. (Givón 1995: 135): (5) If she comes, we will/may consider it. If she ever came, we would!might con-sider it. If she had come, we would have/might have considered it. The degree of the speaker's certainty is de-termined by a set of pragmatic factors. One of them, as pointed out by Akatsuka (1985: 630—638), is the novelty of the information covered by a conditional: the speaker is usu-ally more certain about the newly learned or actualized information. For example, the in-formation obtained in the ongoing discourse is, cross-linguistically, usually marked as almost real. This can be illustrated by the Russian conditional conjunction raz (Iordan-skaja 1988) or Japanese nara (Akatsuka 1985), which represent information that has just en-tered the speaker's consciousness at the time of the speech event. Conditionals raz Q, P in Russian or Q nara, P in Japanese are close in meaning to English (/-clauses in sen-tences, like If you are so smart, (then, I won-der) why are you not rich , and can be interpre-ted in the following way: 'Usually, if Q, then P. I have just observed/learned (or, You have just told me) that Q.
eBook - ePubDescribing and Explaining Grammar and Vocabulary in ELT
Key Theories and Effective Practices
- Dilin Liu(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Table 8.3 , English conditional sentences fall into three types based on the tenses/aspects used, although semantically they may be grouped into many more different categories than listed below (cf. Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1999, p. 548). There are two difficult questions concerning the use of tense/aspect in conditional sentences. The first relates to the use of the simple present in the conditional clause of the type I sentences. Many ESL/EFL learners have difficulty understanding why the simple present is used when the action/event referred to is actually in the future (if it happens). The answer appears to be that it is quite logical to use the simple present to talk about something as a condition because being a condition, it is uncertain whether and when the action/event may happen. Then, one may ask why the present is used to express scheduled future events. A likely sensible explanation is that the present is often used to talk about facts and a scheduled event may be viewed as a fact by the speaker.Table 8.3Tense/aspect in English conditional sentencesThe second difficult question concerns the difference between the future conditional and the hypothetical conditional: “If I have time tomorrow, I’ll be there” vs. “If I had time tomorrow, I would be there.” Obviously, the difference between the two lies in how the speaker views the possibility of having time tomorrow. In other words, the choice of which of the two is determined entirely by the speaker’s viewpoint and intention. Furthermore, some learners may also find the forms for the hypothetical and counterfactual sentences convoluted and unnecessary, especially for learners with an L1 without verb tense/aspect inflections where conditionals are understood from context. For example, if someone actually said “if I am you,” we would certainly understand it is counterfactual because the speaker I cannot really be the listener you. In this sense, the tense/aspect form variation used in the English conditional senses is redundant. An explanation to help these learners better understand the rationale for the unusual and convoluted tense/aspect forms for some of the conditionals is that it is actually the case in almost all languages that additional and often unusual forms are used to express different meanings. For example, English uses inversion and in some cases the auxiliary do to form questions. Similarly, in Chinese—a non-inflectional language—a question marker ma
eBook - PDF- D. Zaefferer(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Conditionals and Unconditionals: Cross-linguistic and Logical Aspects Dietmar Zaefferer Institutfür Deutsche Philologie Universität München Schellingstr. 3 D-8000 München 40 Although conditional sentences are important in all languages, and although their logic' has been thoroughly, if inconclusively, investigated by philosophers, our knowledge and understanding of them in the languages of the world is very poor. (Palmer 1986: 188) 0. Introduction The main purpose of this paper is to argue against the sceptic tenor of its anti-motto, the quotation of Palmer's, and for the continuation of a love story called 'typology meets formal semantics' that has started its delicate course some time ago at the 1983 Stanford symposium on conditionals, and that still needs a lot of encouragement in order to blossom. I think that it deserves this encouragement because it promises substantial progress both for the research in typology and linguistic universals and for formal semantics and language-oriented logics. I will try to argue for this using the example of conditional forms and functions and their relatives on the one hand, and a theory of conditionals inspired by ideas of Barwise, Gardenfors, Heim, Kratzer, Lewis and Rott 1 on the other. Whereas this paper emphasizes the typological data and presents the theory only in rough outline, a (partially overlapping) companion paper to the present one (Zaefferer 1990) spells out the theory in more detail after only a short summary of the typological findings. To get started, some terminological clarifications will be proposed and some methodological principles will be stated. 0.1. Terminological clarifications First: What do I understand by a conditional? A conditional or more explicitly a conditional form is a grammatical structure or construction that encodes a conditional function as its primary purpose.
eBook - PDFCognitive Linguistics in the Redwoods
The Expansion of a New Paradigm in Linguistics
- Eugene H. Casad(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
This latter aspect can also be expressed by the use of the past tense, here again illustrated in (25), but also found in the previously given examples (6) and (21): (25) If this took place in South America, as some evidence suggests, they spread across into the Australian-Antarctic bloc. (380) In fact, such past tense instances are pure cases of inference: here we really have two actual cases of some (past) state of affairs: if one event took place in South America, then the conclusion is that from there some element or other spread across the ocean into other conti-nents (the italicised parts have been added but are part of the implied assumptions made in (25)). We thus see that the course of events character of the main clause in an inferencing conditional can be stronger or weaker: with past tense combinations it is very strong; with progressive forms it is still strong, but in sentences with probable or should (of probability) it is weaker of course, and in questions as in (21) it is weakest. But it is never totally absent. 626 Angeliki Athanasiadou and René Dirven 1.3. Instructive conditionals In an instructive conditional the main clause denotes an instruction of what is to be done in case the situation denoted in the subclause arises. But this is not presented as something hypothetical, but rather as something that normally happens and the further course of events is to act as suggested in the instruction. The instruction is expressed by an imperative form, paraphrases such as it's wise to as in (7), or the deon-tic use of the modals should, can or may. Even with the imperative it is very well possible to suggest a course of events context: (26) If there is more than one contributor, either sort out separate responsibilities or pool the family income. (21) This is not an instruction what to do in a single hypothetical case, but it is an instruction to a tax office worker about how he has to handle cases with more than one contributor to the family income.
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