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When someone asks me "Could you call me at 10 pm?" can I say in response "Ok if I won't be too sleepy." ?

It sounds good to me but also it confuses me because there is no a conditional tense with the simple future in the "if clause".

Since the sentence

"Ok if I won't be too sleepy."

is a short form of

"Yes, I can if I won't bee too sleepy".

it seems that I should say (due to the grammar)

"Yes, I can if I'm not too sleepy"

but this sentence seems weird to me because it sounds like "if I'm not sleepy now". So, which sentence would be correct in this case?

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    I would definitely (as a native American English speaker) say, "Okay, if I'm not too sleepy." Despite the name "present tense" we actually use it to talk about the future a lot, and in a conditional like this I think it's actually mandatory. For example, I would also say "If my manager isn't in the office next week, I won't come to work." The "won't" in the main clause indicates the future on its own and the future tense isn't repeated in the conditional. (I imagine this is hard for second-language speakers to learn!) Jan 27, 2018 at 20:59
  • Thank you, Nicolas. I know the grammar but sometimes I'm confused with some nonstandard sentences anyway. Maybe because in Russian we use the future tense in both parts. In this case, I was confused because the main clause is just "ok", so it doesn't indicate explicitly the future.
    – Serg
    Jan 28, 2018 at 8:16

1 Answer 1

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In present-day English, it is very rare to use will in the protasis of a conditional, whatever the tense.

The only cases I can think of where it occurs are:

  1. Where will means is willing to (which doesn't make sense in the first person). So if he will speak to me means more than if he speaks to me: it implies that he will need to make some particular decision to speak to me (either I think he does not want to speak to me, or I am politely suggesting that it would be a great favour if he spoke to me). In the second person it is often just a polite idiom: If you will come this way means if you condescend to come this way.
  2. With an emphasis on will, in the sense of "insist on doing" or "be determined to do". Example: If you will lean backwards on your chair, you'll fall over one day.

In all other cases, just use the present: if I'm not too sleepy.

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  • Thank you, Colin, for the examples. It would be interesting to know whether "will" was often used in the protasis in old English and, if so, when it changed.
    – Serg
    Jan 28, 2018 at 8:09

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