are these conditional sentences?

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yayangimutdeh
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Apr 02, 2006 7:42 am

are these conditional sentences?

Post by yayangimutdeh » Sun Apr 02, 2006 8:55 am

I want to ask about conditional sentence.

I've checked in every English books about conditional sentences, and I've found out that conditional sentences exist in three conditional situations, they are to say;
1. conditional sentence that TRUE IN THE PRESENT OR FUTURE, ex: I will get hungry during class if I don't eat breakfast.
2. conditional sentence that UNTRUE (CONTRARY TO FACT) IN THE PRESENT / FUTURE. ex: I wouldn't give any tests if I taught this class.
3. conditional sentence that UNTRUE (CONTRARY TO FACT) IN THE PAST. ex: I wouldn't have broken my arm if I hadn't slipped on the ice.

the question are:
if I'm not mistaken I've heard these conditional sentences (I've forgotten where and when). Since that time, I have been wondering if these sentences are allowed in grammatical rules or at least could be used in informal conversation, here're the sentences;
1. I would be eating pizza now if I brought my wallet.
2. He wouldn't have been working here for 2 years if he have shown disloyalty.

please help me....

metal56
Posts: 3032
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2003 4:30 am

Re: are these conditional sentences?

Post by metal56 » Sun Apr 02, 2006 9:14 am

yayangimutdeh wrote:
the question are:
if I'm not mistaken I've heard these conditional sentences (I've forgotten where and when). Since that time, I have been wondering if these sentences are allowed in grammatical rules or at least could be used in informal conversation, here're the sentences;
1. I would be eating pizza now if I brought my wallet.
2. He wouldn't have been working here for 2 years if he have shown disloyalty.

please help me....
Sorry, yayangimutdeh, but they are both not permitted in English use.

If you want a few variants on the common conditionals, here you go:

If he would come, I'd ask him.

If he'll come, I'll ask him.

If he's come, I'll ask him.

If he's going to come, I'd ask him.

If he could come, I'd ask him.

If he can come, I'll ask him.

If he might come, I'd ask him.

If he comes, I'm going to ask him.

If we hadn't been going to ask him, he wouldn't have been invited.

If he hadn't been invited by us, he wasn't going to get an invitation at all.

..................

The possibility of forming a "good" conditional sentence lies in the meaning of the individual clause.

abufletcher
Posts: 162
Joined: Fri Mar 10, 2006 8:12 pm

Post by abufletcher » Sun Apr 02, 2006 9:55 am

"Ya pays yer money, and takes yer chances!" :D

metal56
Posts: 3032
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2003 4:30 am

Post by metal56 » Sun Apr 02, 2006 10:01 am

abufletcher wrote:"Ya pays yer money, and takes yer chances!" :D
Zero conditional?

:)

Is that different from:

"Ya pays yer money, ya takes yer chances!"

And how about...

"Y'come, I leave."

fluffyhamster
Posts: 3031
Joined: Tue Oct 26, 2004 6:57 pm
Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again

Post by fluffyhamster » Sun Apr 02, 2006 10:50 am

1. I would be eating pizza now if I brought my wallet.
2. He wouldn't have been working here for 2 years if he have shown disloyalty.
Sentence 1 would be OK if you added 'had' before 'brought'.
Sentence 2 would be OK if you changed 'have' (ungrammatical) to 'had' (was this a typo?).

Echidna
Posts: 13
Joined: Mon Dec 15, 2003 8:02 pm

Post by Echidna » Tue Apr 04, 2006 11:32 am

Since we're on the subject, how do you rate the following in terms of their acceptability? If you agree that they hold water, are they all alternative forms of conditional sentences? I suspect so, since most of them carry the same sense of the unreal.

He's coming at 6:00? I'd rather he came at 5:00.
No Chinese food, thanks. I'd prefer we went to a Japanese restaurant.
Just suppose that you had a guinea pig; what would you name it?
Let's pretend that we were invisible.
Unless my boss gave me a Christmas bonus, I'd tell him to stuff it.
Oi, nine o'clock already? It's time we went home.

And one more quick question...

Here in the States, many students (though not, admittedly, ESL students) preface their comments in class with fronting such as:

I just wanted to say...
I was just going to say...

Why do people do this? Is it some form of distancing for politeness?

Thanks!

:wink:

Stephen Jones
Posts: 1421
Joined: Sun May 18, 2003 5:25 pm

Post by Stephen Jones » Wed Apr 05, 2006 8:53 pm

The treatment of conditional sentences in the standard teaching textbooks and grammars is a mess; not only are they misexplained but TEFL teachers end up belieiving the misexplanations and discounting their own native judgement and what they see and hear every day.

Forget about the three and four types of conditionals. They are merely a sub-set of possible collocations.

The basic distinction in conditional sentences is whether they are open or remote. Let's look at the distinction.
If he comes later I'll be sure to see him
If he were here, I didn't see him.

are both open conditions - in the first case the possibility is in the future but conventionally expressed in English by the Present Simple and in the second it is in the past, and thus expressed by the Past Simple. This leads to one important point - when you are dealing with open conditions tenses are what you would naturally expect and the only constraints are those of logic and the physical universe.

On the other hand
If I were a millionaire I would buy a Ferrari
is a remote conditional. In this case the Past Simple is actually expressing an unreal condition in the present - that is to say I were a millionaire means I am not a millionaire.. In these cases the use of tenses is more restricted. According to the CGEL (14.1, p739)
"A remote conditional must have a modal auxiliary (usually would, should, could or might) as the apodosis verb (that is to say the main clause verb SNJ), and a modal preterite or irrealis were in the protasis (subordinate (if) clause SNJ)"

So lets now see why the OPs two sentences are incorrect.
*I would be eating pizza now if I brought my wallet.
The problem here is that the Past Simple in remote conditionals refers to an unreal situation in the present, and so to describe an unreal situation in the past we need to use the past perfect.

*He wouldn't have been working here for 2 years if he have shown disloyalty.
Here we need a modal preterite, that is to say we must use a past tense in the 'if' clause to express irreality, so we must use the past perfect, had shown, and not the present perfect.

metal 56
Are you sure this is correct?
?If he's going to come, I'd ask him.

echidna
The only conditional sentence here is
?Unless my boss gave me a Christmas bonus, I'd tell him to stuff it.
I may add the only circumstance in which I can consider it correct would be one you were in the habit of telling bosses who didn't give you a Christmas present where to get off.
The just suppose sentence is not a conditional sentence but has the same meaning and can easily be recast as one.

The other examples you give, including the last two are simply examples of distancing either social distancing or distancing from reality.

Atassi
Posts: 15
Joined: Wed Apr 12, 2006 7:30 pm

Post by Atassi » Fri Apr 14, 2006 2:26 am

Forget about the three and four types of conditionals. They are merely a sub-set of possible collocations.
Good explanation Stephen, and a nice analysis.

yayangimutdeh, fluffyhamster referred you to what was ungrammatical in your original two examples.
I just wanted to say...
I was just going to say...
Echidna, I'm just curious :) ...why do the previous statements sound strange? For your students what would be the alternative to speaking in that way?

Atassi

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