Learn English – If : second conditional or third conditional

conditional-constructions

PEU. 256 and 426 says that

In most subordinate clauses, we use past tenses to express 'unreal' or conditional ideas:

If you asked me nicely, I might get you a drink.(second conditional)

But why not "If you had asked me nicely, I would have got you a drink."?(third conditional) It seems like one asked the other in the past. And what is the difference between those two sentences?

Best Answer

Start by dismissing the ‘first / second / third conditional’ notion from consideration—that is a ‘baby rule’ for introducing beginners to conditional constructions.

The sentence given in your quote may mean two different things: it may be (1) a tentative (hypothetical) conditional in the present tense with future reference, or (2) an open (possible) conditional in the past tense with future-in-past reference. This ambiguity is resolved in the discourse context.

  • (1) If you asked me nicely, I might get you a drink; but right now you are behaving very rudely and you can get your own. —Here the past-form asked and might do not imply past reference but ‘modal remoteness’—that is, you are doubtful that the condition and its consequence will be realized.
  • (2) I told you then that if you asked me nicely, I might get you a drink. —Here the past-form verbs do imply past reference; the sentence represents backshifted If you ask me nicely I may get you a drink, which implies that at the time of utterance you regarded the condition and consequence as future possibilities.

  • Note, by the way, that the pre-backshift present-tense version may equally well be expressed as If you ask me nicely I might get you a drink if the MAY in the consequence clause represents possibility rather than permission. In that case, it will retain the same form, might, when backshifted. The use of modals is very complicated: it has been constantly changing for hundreds of years, and we are in the middle of what appears to be an acceleration of the change.

Your rewrite, however, will bear only one interpretation, a past counterfactual:

  • If you had asked me nicely, I would have got you a drink. —Here the ‘double past’ in both verb constructions (had asked, would have got) marks the sentence as both past-tense and modally remote. This is understood to mean a ‘condition contrary to fact’: on the past occasion of which you are speaking both the condition (your asking nicely) and its consequence (my getting you a drink) failed to occur.

As user3169 and Lucien Sava point out, this is the correct past participle of get in BrE but must be gotten in AmE.