Conditional perfect

Last updated

The conditional perfect is a grammatical construction that combines the conditional mood with perfect aspect. A typical example is the English would have written. [1] The conditional perfect is used to refer to a hypothetical, usually counterfactual, event or circumstance placed in the past, contingent on some other circumstance (again normally counterfactual, and also usually placed in the past). Like the present conditional (a form like would write), the conditional perfect typically appears in the apodosis (the main clause, expressing the consequent) in a conditional sentence.

Contents

English

In English, the conditional perfect is formed using would have together with the past participle of the main verb. The auxiliary would marks the conditional mood (it is occasionally replaced by should in the first person; see shall and will), while the auxiliary have (used in combination with the past participle) marks the perfect aspect (prior occurrence of the event in question). The conditional perfect is used chiefly in the main clause (apodosis) of "third conditional" (or sometimes "mixed conditional") sentences, as described under English conditional sentences. Examples:

It is also possible for the auxiliary would to be replaced by the modals should, could or might to express appropriate modality in addition to conditionality.

Sometimes, in (chiefly American English) informal speech, the would have construction appears in the if-clause as well ("If we would have run faster, we would have arrived earlier"), but this is considered incorrect in formal speech and writing (see English conditional sentences § Use of will and would in condition clauses).

English also has a conditional perfect progressive (would have been writing). For more details on the usage of this and of the ordinary conditional perfect, see the relevant sections of the article Uses of English verb forms.

Other languages

French expresses past counterfactual conditional sentences in exactly the same way as English does: the if clause uses the had + past participle (pluperfect) form, while the then clause uses the would have + past participle form, where the equivalent of would have is the conditional of the auxiliary (avoir or être) used in all perfect constructions for the verb in question. Example:

"If we had known it [pluperfect subjunctive], we would have been able [conditional perfect] to prevent it."

Spanish forms the conditional perfect on similar principles, e.g. yo te habría dicho todo ("I would have told you everything"). [1]

Dutch has a similar tense to the English one, formed with zou/zouden, the past tense of zullen, the auxiliary of the future tenses, e.g. ik zou je alles gezegd hebben ("I would have told you everything"). In Dutch grammar it is called the "perfect past future tense", emphasizing that it also has future-in-past properties.

Some eastern Finnic languages, such as Veps, Ludic and Livvi-Karelian, have come up with a conditional perfect suffix totally foreign to other Finnic languages. In Livvi-Karelian, for example, the conditional perfect suffix is -nuzi- (eg. andanuzin 'I would have given').

For certain other languages, see conditional mood.

See also

Related Research Articles

The subjunctive is a grammatical mood, a feature of an utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude toward it. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred; the precise situations in which they are used vary from language to language. The subjunctive is one of the irrealis moods, which refer to what is not necessarily real. It is often contrasted with the indicative, a realis mood which principally indicates that something is a statement of fact.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English verbs</span> Verbs in the English language

Verbs constitute one of the main parts of speech in the English language. Like other types of words in the language, English verbs are not heavily inflected. Most combinations of tense, aspect, mood and voice are expressed periphrastically, using constructions with auxiliary verbs.

Conditional sentences are natural language sentences that express that one thing is contingent on something else, e.g. "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the main clause of the sentence is conditional on the dependent clause. A full conditional thus contains two clauses: a dependent clause called the antecedent, which expresses the condition, and a main clause called the consequent expressing the result.

The perfect tense or aspect is a verb form that indicates that an action or circumstance occurred earlier than the time under consideration, often focusing attention on the resulting state rather than on the occurrence itself. An example of a perfect construction is I have made dinner. Although this gives information about a prior action, the focus is likely to be on the present consequences of that action. The word perfect in this sense means "completed".

In Portuguese grammar, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and articles are moderately inflected: there are two genders and two numbers. The case system of the ancestor language, Latin, has been lost, but personal pronouns are still declined with three main types of forms: subject, object of verb, and object of preposition. Most nouns and many adjectives can take diminutive or augmentative derivational suffixes, and most adjectives can take a so-called "superlative" derivational suffix. Adjectives usually follow their respective nouns.

This article describes the grammar of Afrikaans, a language spoken in South Africa and Namibia which originated from 17th century Dutch.

The pluperfect, usually called past perfect in English, is a type of verb form, generally treated as a grammatical tense in certain languages, relating to an action that occurred prior to an aforementioned time in the past. Examples in English are: "we had arrived"; "they had written".

In French grammar, verbs are a part of speech. Each verb lexeme has a collection of finite and non-finite forms in its conjugation scheme.

The sequence of tenses is a set of grammatical rules of a particular language, governing the agreement between the tenses of verbs in related clauses or sentences.

The conditional mood is a grammatical mood used in conditional sentences to express a proposition whose validity is dependent on some condition, possibly counterfactual.

German verbs are conjugated depending on their use: as in English, they are modified depending on the persons (identity) and number of the subject of a sentence, as well as depending on the tense and mood.

In linguistics, speech or indirect discourse is a grammatical mechanism for reporting the content of another utterance without directly quoting it. For example, the English sentence Jill said she was coming is indirect discourse while Jill said "I'm coming" would be direct discourse. In fiction, the "utterance" might amount to an unvoiced thought that passes through a stream of consciousness, as reported by an omniscient narrator.

In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying. The term is also used more broadly to describe the syntactic expression of modality – that is, the use of verb phrases that do not involve inflection of the verb itself.

Tense–aspect–mood or tense–modality–aspect is a group of grammatical categories that are important to understanding spoken or written content, and which are marked in different ways by different languages.

This article discusses the conjugation of verbs in a number of varieties of Catalan, including Old Catalan. Each verbal form is accompanied by its phonetic transcription. Widely used dialectal forms are included, even if they are not considered standard in either of the written norms: those of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans and the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua. Other dialectal forms exist, including those characteristic of minor dialects such as Ribagorçan and Algherese and transitional forms of major dialects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Uses of English verb forms</span> Conjugation, finiteness and verb conversion in English grammar

This article describes the uses of various verb forms in modern standard English language. This includes:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English conditional sentences</span>

Prototypical conditional sentences in English are those of the form "If X, then Y". The clause X is referred to as the antecedent, while the clause Y is called the consequent. A conditional is understood as expressing its consequent under the temporary hypothetical assumption of its antecedent.

Hindustani verbs conjugate according to mood, tense, person and number. Hindustani inflection is markedly simpler in comparison to Sanskrit, from which Hindustani has inherited its verbal conjugation system. Aspect-marking participles in Hindustani mark the aspect. Gender is not distinct in the present tense of the indicative mood, but all the participle forms agree with the gender and number of the subject. Verbs agree with the gender of the subject or the object depending on whether the subject pronoun is in the dative or ergative case or the nominative case.

Conditional clauses in Latin are clauses which start with the conjunction 'if' or the equivalent. The 'if'-clause in a conditional sentence is known as the protasis, and the consequence is called the apodosis.

Conditional clauses in Ancient Greek are clauses which start with εἰ (ei) "if" or ἐάν (eān) "if ". ἐάν (eān) can be contracted to ἤν (ḗn) or ἄν (ā́n), with a long vowel. The "if"-clause of a conditional sentence is called the protasis, and the consequent or main clause is called the apodosis.

References

  1. 1 2 Gail Stein, Webster's New World Spanish Grammar Handbook, John Wiley & Sons, 2011. Part VII.