Languages & Linguistics
Third Conditional
The third conditional is a grammatical structure used to talk about hypothetical situations in the past and their potential outcomes. It is formed by using the past perfect tense in the if-clause and the conditional perfect (would have + past participle) in the main clause. This structure is used to express regrets, missed opportunities, or things that could have been different if the past had been different.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
4 Key excerpts on "Third Conditional"
eBook - PDFWho Climbs the Grammar-Tree
[leaves for David Reibel]
- Rosemarie Tracy(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
6. Conditionals Examples (32) and (33) are both Conditional sentences in form, and are therefore directly relevant to the subject of the present paper. Conditionals also display modality in that they often combine a level of probability with the feature for Remoteness or psychological distance we have just been looking at. (35) If you had driven faster, we would have caught our train. This implies something like: (36) You drove slowly, so we didn't catch our train. (36) is a genuine Past time-zone sentence; but (35) is hypothetical, as to some extent Conditionals always are. Notice first the verb-form in the i/-clause (the protasis) of (35) - it looks like a Past Perfect, but if you consider its meaning, it certainly does not analyse into ET<-(RT<-ST). This is for the simple reason that no event of 'driving faster 1 actually took 322 place: this is a hypothetical event (signalled by if) 2 . So we have a 'Past Perfect' that is no Past Perfect; what does the other clause give us? Here, in the so-called 'consequence clause' (the apodosis), we have a verb-form usually referred to as the 'Conditional Perfect 1 . But look in the literature of any explanation of the Conditional Perfect, and you will look in vain. What does it actually mean? What connection does it have with other Perfects (i.e. ordinary Past, Present and Future Perfect, as well as the pseudo-Past Perfect found in //-clauses)? What connection does it have with other uses of would? It seems to me that the lack of any explanation at all of the Conditional - or in fact of any of the uses of would -stems from the assumption that the verb paradigm is all a single monolithic system, defined in terms of 'tense', 'mood', 'aspect', 'voice', or some combination of these.
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.
- Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible, Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
998 X. Syntactic Typology 76. Conditional constructions 1. Introduction 2. Conditionals in logic and linguistics 3. Conditional markers 4. Tense, aspect, mood, modality and polarity in conditionals 5. Conditionals are topics 6. Conditionals, concessive conditionals and concessives 7. Special abbreviations 8. References 1. Introduction Conditionals are a subclass of sentences that contain adverbial clauses of circumstance. The inventory of circumstantial relations that may be expressed by complex sentences with adverbial clauses traditionally includes con-ditional relations, in addition to causal, temporal, concessive, concessive conditional, comparative, purposive and resultative ones. A prototypical conditional sentence, like (1) (1) If the weather is fine we shall go for a walk. consists of two clauses, one of which (if the weather is fine), usually called protasis, ante-cedent or, simply, «/-clause, expresses a prop-osition whose fulfillment or non-fulfillment is relevant to the degree of reality assigned to the proposition expressed by another clause (we shall go for a walk), usually called apodo-sis or consequent (Trask 1993: 55). There are not many systematic cross-linguistic studies of conditionals. Among the few are Traugott et al. 1986, Athanasiadou & Dirven 1997, Xrakovskij 1998. Our overview of the structure of condi-tionals across languages will be organized as follows: In §2., we shall briefly discuss how the conditional relation in natural languages differs from material implication as defined in logic. § 3. examines formal types of condi-tionals. In §4., we will look at grammatical marking of protasis and apodosis. In § 5., discourse functions of conditionals are dis-cussed. Finally, in § 6., we show how condi-tionals are related to concessive conditionals and concessives.
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.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
