Sunday 17 January 2016

grammaticality - What would you do if I told you+subordinate clause

In this case, the issue you are brushing up against is, I think, the English subjunctive tense. Native English speakers use a tense for hypothetical or contrary-to-fact situations that marks these as things that are not necessarily true. An illustrative example might be "If I were a thief, I think I would be good at stealing wallets." This was in the subjunctive tense; I'm not actually a thief, and I don't necessarily want to imply that I am one, so the use of "were" helps mark the statement as hypothetical.



Of course, the problem is that the subjunctive case just doesn't get used all that consistently by native English speakers. I suspect this is because it's often really formal sounding and maybe a little redundant at times. I mean, the use of the word "if" in the example above already marks the statement as hypothetical to a degree.



In your first example, I agree that "had" makes more sense, just because the proper subjunctive verb in the first part is "would." That is, "I'd" is short for "I would," as in if this thing were true about me, I would be a liar. "Had" matches the tense of "would" in that sense better than "have" does because the English subjunctive tends to match more closely the past tense than the present one in form. But I think that's a pretty tricky example.



As for your second example, I believe the second one is more correct for the same reason--"loved" matches "would" better than "love" does, but I suspect plenty of native speakers would stumble on that one as well, or simply not notice the difference.



More information can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_subjunctive

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