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?
- She looked at him as if he were a different person.
- 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.
- She said it with such confidence, as if she knew something they did not.
- 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:
- 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:
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.
There is no such open question with this sentence.