On grammar.ccc Rob De Decker, who (as it is written there) teaches English at a Flemish grammar school in Belgium, explains the so-called first, second and third conditional.
Instant English, a best-seller, by John Peter Sloan, has a lot of pages on these grammatical constructs, which are called, again, first, second and third conditional.
Nevertheless, some EL&U competent users, like Barrie England and tchrist, more and more times repeated that the rules established with these definitions are nonsense in English grammar.
Among others, tchrist's comment below appears to be notable; what expressed is not different from Barrie England's thought.
This whole “1st/2nd/etc conditional” thing is purely an ESL meme that is never taught to native English speakers in the course of their regular grammar-school education, and which furthermore makes very little sense when subjected to rigorous analysis. I think it just confuses people to no useful end.
Obviously I don't doubt that what tchrist claims is true, albeit those definitions are useful for ESL learners.
How do English native speakers render those patterns according to British or U.S. English grammar courses?
For example, what are the real grammar rules under the following sentences, which are called first, second and third conditional by international English learners?
- First conditional: If I have enough money, I will go to Japan.
- Second conditional:If I had enough money, I would go to Japan.
- Third conditional: If I had had enough money, I would have gone to Japan.
Best Answer
The Three Conditionals (or sometimes Four Conditionals) provide perfectly adequate explanations of the sentences you cite.
So did what was taught in US high schools in my youth under the rubric Sequence of Tenses. (At least I think it did; I wasn't paying that much attention at the time.)
What needs to be kept in mind is that these are what I have elsewhere called ‘baby rules’. Students must master crawling before they walk and walking before they run, and rules of this sort are directed to crawling and walking. Your ordinary English class or English grammar textbook is a linguistic hothouse, where students are carefully isolated from uses which lie outside, and appear to violate, the rules they are learning. This provides a foothold on the language which permits the student to grow in mastery and confidence (and of course ‘self-esteem’, which is of great concern to modern educators) before they are released into the wild and must confront the horrors of real life: colloquial, business and literary English.
What tchrist (indignantly) and Barrie England (charitably) are concerned to point out (on ELU, where the audience is presumed to be sophisticated users) is that these rules are inadequate maps to large tracts of that wilderness; such sentences, for instance, as these:
Rules are for learning with; but once you’ve learned enough to walk on your own you can discard these crutches.