[Corpora-List] If + would , would

[J-C Khalifa]

Hi again,

>It's not right to say, as someone did, that if +would removes the 
>volitional force of "would" in favour of the
>"hypothetical or counterfactual" one.

If someone said that, it certainly wasn't me, Yorick ;-) On the contrary, 
I'm aware that "standard" examples of IF + WOULD are indeed volitional, and 
that those few that aren't are all the more interesting for us linguists.

>  I'm pretty sure though that the negative form with
>if is distinctively American  ["If he would have had the balls to..."
>as someone suggested] and grates on other native speakers for reasons
>I cant quite see, since "would have had" is standard English.

Indeed! The linguistic problem is that IF-clauses are, in English as in 
French, incompatible with WILL/WOULD whenever the modal is NOT volitional:
*If he will come tomorrow, we'll go to the movies (cf. French "*s'il 
viendra demain... ")
*If he would come tomorrow, we'd go to the movies (cf. French "*s'il 
viendrait demain...")
Interestingly, the incompatibility is extended in English to WHEN-clauses, 
again unless the modal is volitional:
*When he will come tomorrow, we'll go..."
(which is not the case in French, BTW, but this is neither here nor there)

But the reason why I'm mentioning French here is that indeed, the 
IF...WOULD pattern does exist, even though it's deemed 
substandard/ungrammatical:

?Si j'aurais su, je n'y serais pas allé (lit. "If I would have known, I 
wouldn't have gone)
The standard form should be "Si j'avais su..." with imperfect tense

Jean-Charles
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