Monday, January 5, 2015

grammar - conditional mood, can the hypothetical entity be identified?

Does English grammar distinguish between a conditional sentence where the point of view is realistic, but the result is indeterminate; and one where the point of view is hypothetical, but the result is deteriminate?



Example 1: Suppose my neighbor is engaged to be married and we are talking about his up-coming wedding three weeks off.





What would you do if it rained like this on your wedding day?




We expect the wedding to happen as scheduled, but have utterly no opinions about the weather three weeks from now. Is the above sentence grammatically the best, or could it be improved by replacing rained by was raining, was to rain, were raining, or were to rain? Do any of these help to indicate a factual event subject to unpredictable weather?



Example 2: Suppose my neighbor has no plans to marry.





What would you do if you got married on a day like today?




Here, it is the wedding that is hypothetical, and we are specifying the weather. Can this mood be conveyed better with were getting, or were to get?



My searches for info on this yielded nothing. But the examples seem to show that there are sometimes more options in the first case.



Do any dialects purpose or repurpose auxiliary verbs to achieve this distinction?



Is there a pair of statements which applies to each example, but not the other?

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