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Prototypical conditional sentences in English are those of the form "If X, then Y". The clause X is referred to as the antecedent (or protasis), while the clause Y is called the consequent (or apodosis). A conditional is understood as expressing its consequent under the temporary hypothetical assumption of its antecedent.
A conditional sentence is a sentence in a natural language that expresses that one thing is contingent on another, e.g., "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the sentence’s main clause is conditional on a subordinate clause.
An anapodoton (from Ancient Greek ἀναπόδοτον anapódoton: "that which lacks an apodosis, that is, the consequential clause in a conditional sentence), plural anapodota, is a rhetorical device related to the anacoluthon; both involve a thought being interrupted or discontinued before it is fully expressed. It is a figure of speech or ...
Examples are the English and French conditionals (an analytic construction in English, [c] but inflected verb forms in French), which are morphologically futures-in-the-past, [1] and of which each has thus been referred to as a "so-called conditional" [1] [2] (French: soi-disant conditionnel [3] [4] [5]) in modern and contemporary linguistics ...
English has indicative, imperative, conditional, and subjunctive moods. Not all the moods listed below are clearly conceptually distinct. Individual terminology varies from language to language, and the coverage of, for example, the "conditional" mood in one language may largely overlap with that of the "hypothetical" or "potential" mood in ...
These conditionals differ in both form and meaning. The indicative conditional uses the present tense form "owns" and therefore conveys that the speaker is agnostic about whether Sally in fact owns a donkey. The counterfactual example uses the fake tense form "owned" in the "if" clause and the past-inflected modal "would" in the "then" clause ...
There are indicative mood forms for, in addition to the future-as-viewed-from-the-past usage of the conditional mood form, the following combinations: future; an imperfective past tense–aspect combination whose form can also be used in contrary-to-fact "if" clauses with present reference; a perfective past tense–aspect combination whose ...
The conditional perfect is a grammatical construction that combines the conditional mood with perfect aspect.A typical example is the English would have written. [1] The conditional perfect is used to refer to a hypothetical, usually counterfactual, event or circumstance placed in the past, contingent on some other circumstance (again normally counterfactual, and also usually placed in the past).