Getting Your Tricky Conditionals Right

 

I’ve had several questions recently about conditionals. Some of them are from listeners asking about kinds of conditionals called the “first, second, and third conditionals.” Meanwhile, a listener named Lorelai has a different question. She understands English conditionals fairly well, but is uncertain about conditionals like this one:

If he died fighting, why didn’t they tell us about it?

The dying happened in the past, but, as Lorelai wrote in an e-mail, “shouldn’t conditional clauses that refer to past actions be in past perfect and not past simple?” In other words, Lorelai wants to know why the conditional clause isn’t “If he had died fighting.” It’s not surprising that she’s confused, and moreover, her question is related to the question about first, second, and third conditionals.

First, Second, and Third Conditionals

Here’s the deal: First conditional, second conditional, and third conditional are not helpful or informative names, and in my opinion they aren’t worth teaching. Worst of all, textbooks that teach conditionals using these names usually forget all about the exact kind of conditional Lorelai has stumbled into. Today we’re going to lay out not three, but four basic kinds of conditionals, and call them by names that are more informative and easier to remember than arbitrary numerical names.

Conditionals and the Subjunctive Mood

You probably expect that if I’m talking about conditionals, I’m going to talk about the subjunctive mood. I’ve talked about the subjunctive in conditionals before, in episodes 160 and 238. But today, we’re going to look at conditionals in a different way, which you may find easier.

Present-Time Open Conditional: The Options Are Open

Let’s take the sentence “If Squiggly knows the answer, he isn’t saying.” This conditional is talking about the present time, about whether something is true right now: Does Squiggly know the answer? We call it an open conditional because Squiggly may or may not know the answer. Either possibility is open. So “If Squiggly knows the answer” is a present-time open conditional.

The present tense can also be used in future-time open conditionals. Adapting Lorelai’s example, we could ask, “If he dies in battle, will they tell us about it?” It’s talking about something that may or may not...

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