Learn English – The Subjunctive in Past “as If” Sentences

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I'd like to know how to use the subjunctive mood (if that's how it's called) when describing an unreal situation in the past. Should I use the Past Perfect, like in the past unreal conditional, or the "normal" subjunctive?

  1. She looked at him as if he were a different person.
  2. She looked at him as if he had been a different person.

Which one is correct? I have seen a couple of similar questions to this one with contradictory answers.

  1. She said it with such confidence, as if she knew something they did not.
  2. She said it with such confidence, as if she had known something they did not.

Does sentence #3 imply that the speaker is unsure whether she actually knew something they didn't, while the sentence #4 says that she did not know; or is the first sentence used for both meanings?

I know it's possible to use the Past Perfect to describe unreal situations when it should be Past Perfect regardless of the subjunctive mood, like:

  1. He looked as if he had seen a ghost.

Please note that I don't ask about that.

Best Answer

Here's the rules for past perfect. Generally, the concept of past perfect is that you are emphasizing/signifying something happened before something else. If you don't specify that "something else", the listener/reader is expecting to have been told that from earlier sentences or get it from future sentences.

They don't change with subjunctive mood.

So with this:

She looked at him as if he had been a different person.

technically, there is an open question - he had been a different person before/after/at the same time as ... what? That "what" could be from earlier context or be supplied in future context.

She looked at him as if he were a different person.

There is no such open question with this sentence.

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