Will/would buy you lunch

Question

If I have some money now, I will buy you lunch.If I have some money now, I would buy you lunch.Is it right for me to state BOTH are correct?

CalifJim · Accepted Answer

anonymous
If I have some money now, I will buy you lunch.
If I have some money now, I would buy you lunch.

Is it right for me to state BOTH are correct?

Both are very unlikely ever to be said, you realize, don't you? Most likely you would know if you had enough money to buy lunch for someone. If not, you would check about your person before making such an offer.

That aside, and considering only "sequence of tenses", only the first (have with will) is strictly speaking grammatical. Especially if you were a teacher in front of a class of beginners, you would never say that the second one is correct. Beside the fact that it violates the sequence of tenses, it expresses a rather strange combination of ideas, namely that having money now is a real fact that can be verified immediately and, in contradiction, the possibility of buying lunch is expressed as only a theoretical possibility, as if it were some doubtful philosophical notion.

CJ

Will/would buy you lunch

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