Is using "would + present tense" bad grammar?
I said "Would it be alright if I go with you?" to a classmate and she replied with "Sure, it would be OK if you came with me." which threw me off a bit.
I know you are supposed to say "I would rather you didn't." but does that mean I can only use would + simple past?
Best Answer
One way of tackling this problem is to comply with the rules of thumb that are presented in many grammars, stating that we have three (or four) conditional constructions: the (zero,) first, second, and third conditionals. Cambridge Grammar of English says:
Your examples fall under the second conditional, and therefore they should be:
This is one way to settle this, with an easy rule of thumb.
However, linguists don't seem to agree with that simplified categorization. They (or some of them) have rather an eccentric attitude toward this matter, which I'm not going to bring up, as I'm not a linguist and am not qualified to speak for them. But one thing we can do: we can carry out searches in corpora for conditional patterns and see if we can gain an understanding of the matter for ourselves.
A search in the Corpus of Contemporary American English for "would be ... if " (with a gap of zero to five words) yields 8665 results. (I searched for"would be" to exclude results like "would have", etc.) I examined the first and last pages (containing about 160 hits) and found about thirteen hits with the present tense in the if clause. Some of them are:
Most of these hits were in the spoken category, then in the news, then magazines, and two or three in the academic category.
Some of the results were irrelevant, like this one:
The same search in the British National Corpus yields just one or two present tenses in those 130 hits I examined, and in my opinion they're almost invalid:
Although this hasty attempt is too shaky to qualify as a basis for extracting accurate, generic grammar rules, I think we can say these:
1- In American English the construction "would + present tense" is not very common in conditional sentences, but is used occasionally (on about 10% of the occasions). By a simple calculation, there should be over 500 instances(†) of this construction in COCA, which is a considerable number that should not be disregarded as wrong or invalid. Maybe it has special uses, but this is not the best place to investigate that. It's seldom used in the formal written style, for example.
2- In British English, "would + present tense" is almost never used in conditional sentences.
3- Overall, it may be safer to just stick with the so-called second conditional construction in exams or other sensitive situations.
(†) Edit: actually a lot more, because of the heavily restricted way of my searching
All that said, let me touch on the fact that the question in the title of your post is broader than the one in the body. I've heard some people use past tenses with would in non-conditional sentences, like "I wish that I would do you a favor that you actually needed". That's a whole other story, I think.