A native speaker told me that using "could" would be unnatural in the first example, but it works in the second. Do both sentences express permission?
If I am not mistaken "could" is used when asking for permission. If both express permission, then why doesn't "could" work in the first example?
Or is the first sentence asking "are we allowed?" In which case "could" isn't used?
- Can we look words up in a dictionary?
- Can/could I borrow your dictionary, please?
Best Answer
Not necessarily. Context will provide the answer. The second sentence is clearly a request for permission, but the first could be asking about what one is able to do. Say, if the previous question was "What is a dictionary for?"
But there's a third word often used for permission: may. Can technically and officially means "able to, but it is very often used in casual speech when we mean to talk about permission. Elementary school teachers and overly pedantic people might enjoy correcting it:
But such use is so widespread that the correction is perhaps unreasonable in all but the most formal contexts.
Could complicates things: it's just can, but in the conditional tense. But this conditional is commonly used to make a request less direct and more polite. "Can I/Could I borrow your dictionary?" Both are very common usage. Both will be understood (by any reasonable person) as a request for permission. But the "could" version is just a little softer (since the conditional suggests some uncertainty, some openness to the possibility that the person might say "no").
In the Disney movie Frozen, a bit of wordplay highlights the way could can shift from a hypothetical conditional to permission (and its relationship to may): Surprised by a gift, a character exclaims "I could kiss you!" and then, embarrassed, continues, "I could. I mean, I’d like to. May I? I mean, may we?" Could started simply as expressing conditional possibility, and as he shifted his meaning to requesting permission, he transitioned to may.