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When referring to hypothetical future circumstance, there may be little difference in meaning between the first and second conditional (factual vs. counterfactual, realis vs. irrealis). The following two sentences have similar meaning, although the second (with the second conditional) implies less likelihood that the condition will be fulfilled:
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.
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 ...
(The second vowel of ἐάν (eán) is long, as appears from examples in Sophocles and Aristophanes.) [15] Conditional sentences of this kind are referred to by Smyth as the "more vivid" future conditions, and are very common. [16] In the following examples, the protasis has the present subjunctive, and the apodosis has the future indicative:
The United States Constitution and its amendments comprise hundreds of clauses which outline the functioning of the United States Federal Government, the political relationship between the states and the national government, and affect how the United States federal court system interprets the law.
They were first discussed as a problem for the material conditional analysis of conditionals, which treats them all as trivially true. Starting in the 1960s, philosophers and linguists developed the now-classic possible world approach, in which a counterfactual's truth hinges on its consequent holding at certain possible worlds where its ...
The English subjunctive is realized as a finite but tenseless clause.Subjunctive clauses use a bare or plain verb form, which lacks any inflection.For instance, a subjunctive clause would use the verb form "be" rather than "am/is/are" and "arrive" rather than "arrives", regardless of the person and number of the subject.
The biconditional is true in two cases, where either both statements are true or both are false. The connective is biconditional (a statement of material equivalence), [2] and can be likened to the standard material conditional ("only if", equal to "if ... then") combined with its reverse ("if"); hence the name. The result is that the truth of ...