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Anonymous Posted 13 years ago
Grammar

confusion with a conditional sentence

I read a thread on conditionals in which the questioner(or thread starter) was confused about the following sentence:
If I hadn't broken up with Kate last month, I would have been dating her for 2 years.

He/ she (the tread starter) interpreted the above sentence in the following way:

At first glance, it looks like a typical sentence of "third conditional/ type 3 conditional" indicating that both the
conditional clause and the main clause refer to past time. Thus I assume this sentence implies that last month was
supposed to mark the second anniversary, in other words, LAST MONTH was the very second anniversary.

However, I somehow feel like this sentence reads otherwise; it's a sentence of "mixing time references", and so A
CONDITION IS IN THE PAST and THE CONSEQUENCES ARE IN THE PRESENT. I think, in this interpretation, this
sentence implies that THIS MONTH/ NOW were the second the second anniversary (if they hadn't broken up)

Now here is what my interpretation is about the sentence in question and I need to know if my way of interpreting it is correct.

If I hadn't broken up with Kate last month, I would have been dating her for 2 years.

[The sentence is saying that you did break up with Kate last month, and you are not dating her now. But if This hadn't not been true (you hadn't broken up with her), it would have been
two years now(or is it better to say ' it would be two years now'?) since you started dating her.
Or If you hadn't broken up with her last month, you would still be dating her (but here the 'time period' of you dating her is not mentioned).

Dear teachers, also please correct my grammatical mistakes if there are any.
Thank you.
  

Top answer

I'm not a teacher, but in my opinion if you use "would be", then the period of two years is closing now; if you use "would have been", then the period of two years ended in last month.

  • I'm not a teacher, but in my opinion if you use "would be", then the period of two years is closing now; if you use "would have been", then the period of two years ended in last month.
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1 Answers
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I'm not a teacher, but in my opinion if you use "would be", then the period of two years is closing now; if you use "would have been", then the period of two years ended in last month.

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