The Grammar Corner:
If I Would’ve, I Could’ve
by Don Webb
Notice the title: it’s “would have,” not “would of.” Bewildering Stories frowns very severely upon contracting “have” as “of.”
| Le nez de Cléopâtre, s’il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé. — Blaise Pascal | If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed. |
That has to be the most succinct statement ever written of the principle of time-travel and alternate-history stories. It’s also a grammar lesson, and one that’s less abstruse than it might appear at first glance. Hang on.
In Daniel Dives’ “Dogwood Blossom,” Vine asks: “If I’d ask you to kill me, would you do it?” One of our editors points out quite correctly that the standard form is: “If I asked you to kill me, would you do it?”
I’m reluctant to change what Vine says:
The standard sequence of tenses in writing or formal speech is indeed: “If I asked you to kill me, would you do it?”
The standard form is optional in the spoken language, at least in North America; “would ... would” can also be used. if you’re a really gung-ho grammar gorilla, you can call it the modal non-present tense.
- Most often, “if + would” is used in the past perfect tense — again, in colloquial speech, not in formal writing — to state a counterfactual hypothesis:
- “If I would have asked you to kill me, would you have done it?”
The modal past perfect (you must be gung ho; you’ve followed me this far) can be used in the spoken language to make the tenses parallel and to emphasize the unreality of the hypothesis. But try telling your teacher that the next time she calls you on it. And Bewildering Stories will insist on the standard sequence of tenses everywhere but in informal dialogue.
Pascal uses eût été (‘had been’) in the “if”-clause, and he could have written eût changé (‘would have changed’) in the conclusion, as well. Voilà, the tenses would have been perfectly parallel. But he uses the past conditional instead of the pluperfect subjunctive to avoid repeating eût.
Things go in cycles. English — at least in its colloquial style — seems to be evolving something similar to the form Pascal used more than 300 years ago, only without the qualms about repetition.
Copyright © 2006 by Don Webb
