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my reason for stating that wiki was "unhelpful" with this statement is that the statement stands on its own and is not really related to the "conditional" aspect!
I think what the article was saying is that the conditional mood in English has been overloaded with a tense usage. I don't really see what value-added using the future-in-the-past gets you in the paragraph quoted above. And when reading it, the conditional was always lurking on the periphery of my consciousness. "The second half of the game would have been defined by ..., if it hadn't been for that UFO landing in the middle of downtown LA."
I guess that this "style" was just contrived by someone who was bored with the indicative mood.
Well, the tense exists. I was just questioning its use in that paragraph. For me, putting the future in the past does nothing but make for longer sentences.
[Addendum: I have been reading up on the future-in-the-past and find that it occurs in the Romance languages as well, where the conditional mood of the auxiliary 'to be' (in the present tense) is used with the past participle, e.g., in Italian La settimana scorsa, Maria mi ha informato che Paolo sarebbe tornato il giorno dopo ("Last week, Maria informed me that Paolo would return the day after").]
Last edited by zmjezhd; 03/14/10 04:07 PM.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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I guess that this "style" was just contrived by someone who was bored with the indicative mood.
... Or wanted to achieve live action in what is basically reportage. While writing there is sometimes a strange need to avoid the simple past. I have experienced it and then over come it, because, yes, longer sentences and ..... untidy language.
Last edited by Avy; 03/14/10 03:34 PM.
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Last week, Maria informed me that Paolo would return the day after - sorry, but this use of would doesn't correspond to the one in tsuwm's example - because here, you have a dependent sentence referring to a different time. This is a clear case of "future in the past", contrary to the sports text.
Last edited by wsieber; 03/14/10 04:21 PM.
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you have a dependent sentence referring to a different time. This is a clear case of "future in the past", contrary to the sports text.
So, what is the verb form, in the sports quote, called? And what is the sports text if not future-in-the-past?
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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past-in-the-future?
-joe (tongue-in-the-cheek) friday
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The second half of the game would be defined by offensive runs from both teams and tough, physical play.
The second half of the game could be defined by offensive runs from both teams and tough, physical play.
The second half of the game should be defined by offensive runs from both teams and tough, physical play.
The second half of the game can be defined by offensive runs from both teams and tough, physical play.
Which one would you choose if you could and what tense will it be?
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Bran, if you ask me (and you did), those choices can all be interpreted in slightly different ways: The second half of the game would be defined by offensive runs from both teams and tough, physical play.This is the 'original', and seems to be best described by future-in-the-past tense - it states how things played out. The second half of the game could be defined by offensive runs from both teams and tough, physical play.This is another way of saying "the second half might be defined by..." - conditional? The second half of the game should be defined by offensive runs from both teams and tough, physical play.opinionated.  (or, actual future/predictive) The second half of the game can be defined by offensive runs from both teams and tough, physical play. see #2. I guess I would recast it somewhat like jheem has done; simpler and clearer. options 2, 3 and 4 change the voice, I think.
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Thanks, I like the explanation and will go puzzling no less when I'll have to make choices. These auxiliary verbs shall, will, may and can; also must, have to and should are the most difficult part of English grammar to me.
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options 2, 3 and 4 change the voice, I think.
No, the voice remains passive, but the mood changes. Here are two sentences that illustrate the active versus the passive voice:
1. I read newspapers.
2. Newspapers are read (by me).
Both are present tense and indicative mood. The modal verbs (aka auxiliary verbs) in English a rather complicated little things, e.g., can implies ability (but nowadays it's often used in a permissive sense, like may). Historically, these verbs were from a different class of verbs in Germanic called preterite-present. They main trait is they exist only in present and past forms, and they do not distinguish between third person singular present and the other persons and numbers, i.e., I may, *I shall may, I can, he can, I read, he reads. Most of our traditional grammar terms come from the Graeco-Latin grammatical tradition. A big difference between Latin and English is that we have very little verbal inflectional morphology left and most of our verbal conjugations are done periphrastically.
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There's probably enough 2 centses in here already, but I throw in 2 more: in Spanish, the idea of "used to" is expressed in the imperfect tense, a past tense form. I'd be interested to know why it's called "imperfect".
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