Sunday, February 3, 2013

grammar - General rules for identifying conditional sentences?



I am trying to identify the subject and object in the following sentence:




Come to me, and I'll give you a fight you'll never forget




At first, it appeared as if whenever a conjunction appears after a clause, and there's a future tense verb in the following clause, then it's a conditional sentence. My major problem here is whether this is a valid conditional sentence. Here, the speaker is actually saying





I'm an interesting fighter




and not typically providing a condition for a result. I am trying to find out if there's any general rule for identifying a real conditional sentence. Could the rule that applies to this sentence be classified as one for identifying idioms? Thanks.


Answer



The first statement is conditional, and the second statement is not. The two sentences you have provided are not the same.



The first statement says, quite literally, that if you come, then I will give you a fight you will never forget. That is definitively conditional, as the speaker will only give the reader a "fight [he/she] will never forget" if the reader shows up.




The statement may imply that the speaker considers himself an interesting fighter, but that is a mere implication – it is not what the statement is literally saying. Conditional sentences are defined by their literal meaning and their structure, not by the implications behind the statements.


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