Timeline for Regarding usage of would in conditional sentences
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| Aug 8 at 10:16 | history | migrated | from english.stackexchange.com (revisions) | ||
| Aug 8 at 1:41 | comment | added | LPH | @PhilSweet proximity, that is true. We can verify this fact in the German "wenn" which means both "if" and "when". Let's remark again the effect of tense mismatch in "When you tell her she wouldn't believe it."; "will not" is right, here. It seems to me that you confuse "He said that she wouldn't believe it." (backshift, which is actually but a tendency, as "He said that she does not believe it." is correct and means the same thing) with "If you told her she wouldn't believe it." (hypothetical marker "would", present "does not" sounds awfully off). (2/2) | |
| Aug 8 at 1:41 | comment | added | LPH | @PhilSweet The hypothesis is not relative to the story, but instead it is relative to telling her the story ( "(If you told her) She wouldn't believe it"): In the hypothesis you told her she wouldn't believe it. If you replace "would" by "will" in the full sentence, then the resulting sentence sounds off. As you use "will" there cannot be either an understated nor overt hypothesis that she should be told; the understated assumption is that "when" she is told the fact she will not believe it. The two concepts are in close (1/2) | |
| Aug 7 at 19:25 | comment | added | Phil Sweet | Let's say you have established a story as true. Now you establish that it doesn't matter - she would still never believe it is true. There isn't anything hypothetical here (from either the subject or narrator's point of view). We just have two facts that are incongruous. Notice that if we switched to reported speech it just becomes a back shifted would, but if we switched to quoted speech, the would changes to will. So this is something that happens with narration. It's one way to handle incongruous statements by presenting them like universal truths using modal would. | |
| Aug 7 at 17:13 | history | answered | LPH | CC BY-SA 4.0 |