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.
