Talk:Conditional sentence
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Where do the terms "Zero conditional" through "Third conditional" come from? I've never heard them. Also, this page's title implies it's about the verb form called "conditional" in many language, e.g. French j'irais 'I would go'. But the content is much more about conditional sentences, which may or may not be formed with conditional verb forms (e.g. French si tu feras la vaisselle, je l'essuyerai 'if you wash the dishes, I will dry them'). I'll try to remedy this over the next few days and weeks. --Angr 08:11, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
IMO, this classification is extremely superficial, and not even English-centric, as it does not cover the "minus one" conditional, past indefinite general condition, expressing the action that was common and happened in the past when a condition was true (going exactly like I just said: When the condition was true, the action happened). This is the form one would expect in literary prose, and it is invalid a classification that does not incude it.
Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar gives a classification for Latin that is much deeper that that. I cannot say whether it would work for most languages or not (Latin, like English, does not distinguish the Subjunctive and the Desiderative), but it is much more practical. In general (if we join their cases A and B — I do not see why are the present and future cases different), there are, on one axis, General conditions, occuring customarily at indefinite time (our “0-conditional”), Simple conditions, not-yet-fulfilled, uncertan at a time when they are set, and Contrary-to-fact conditions, that were already false by the sentence set time. On the second axis, there is grammatical time: past, present and future. While not all combination are possible in a particular language, all make sense; even “future contrary-to-fact” may potentially exist in some language, to express a condition that is already doomed to fail in near future, breaking the IE idiom “future = uncertainity.” For instance, if you wake up and realize that, however fast you run, you'll be late to the train (but it has not departed as yet), then in English you would set that in present or even past time (if only I were(or was) not late/if only I had not been late), as if the event is happening now or has already happened, but I cannot say whether that shift is universal accross all natural human languages.
For one more example of the incompleteness of the present classification, while an expression of the idea that in the future, when/if X is true, Y will customarily happen (Future conditional), matches the form of this “1-conditional”, it assumes distinct forms in Latin and Russian.
— Kkmº 14:01, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
So now this topic has its own page, as it deserves. It is still very incomplete in its treatment of the various kinds of condition. The system demonstated here seems to derive from a rather confused ESL teaching method. The standard classification system from Latin and Classical Greek is more rigorous and also makes more intuitive sense in terms of names for the different conditions. I will try to work that system in later. But I suppose we should also leave the "zero condition" etc system too, because it does seem to get used. Lesnail 22:28, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Title
What if we change the title to "Conditional Structures of English" or "English Conditional Structures"? I think "Conditional sentence" is too broad for this article.--YellowLeftHand 08:32, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Conditional Forms of Verbs in English
I'd like to make a remark concerning the said-to-be-missing conditional forms of verbs in English:
In "If I were ....", what else than a special, conditional, form of "be" do we have? It is resembling the German "Wenn ich ... wäre ..." in comparison to "Ich war ..." -- "I was ...".
It might be a relict, but indicates that once there was a much richer grammar used with the English language than today. The remainings should still be taken for what they are, just like the declination of pronouns ("who"-"whom", "you (thou)" - "thee" and so on).
Uwe
[edit] Rewrite
I just overhauled the page, which was previously an attempt to project the Latin classification (which deserves to be mentioned in is own right) onto English. The page is still far from satisfactory (needs more general discussion, and references). I took out the "zero condition" … "third condition" terminology for English, because I am not familiar with it, but someone can reinsert it. CapnPrep 08:08, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
- You may not have noticed the article Counterfactual conditional, which covers the same basic information as the section "Irrealis conditions" of this article. I've linked to it as the "Main article" on the topic. —Angr 09:33, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
Counterfactual conditional is more like a logic-oriented article about how to represent the meaning of these constructions (and in principle, not just in English). And so it was already linked to from the (stubby) semantics section of this article. But that's fine, I'm happy to see this page develop in any way (as long as it doesn't turn into another "Here's how you say X in 600 languages" article). CapnPrep 10:13, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
This page should be broadly categorised by language, whilst some languages will share common forms of conditional sentences, there needs to be a uniform format for indicating what conditional forms apply to which language (maybe seperate headings for each language, or a list of languages in which it occurs after the form..using a table?)
There are some clearer rules regarding the conditionals in English that i shall endeavour to put something together on based on some grammar reference texts :)
Charles evesson 15:11, 20 April, 2008 (GMT +10)
