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"If they would have been painted this afternoon, the walls would be completely dry by tomorrow evening."

The quoted sentence is ungrammatical. I believe it has something to do with tense, but I do not believe that the 'if...would be' structure requires parallelism. So what is wrong with this sentence? Thank you.

George Newton
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2 Answers2

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We don't normally like to use would in conditional antecedents (read if-clauses). The standard phrasing for your sentence would be:

  • If they had been painted this afternoon, the walls would be completely dry by tomorrow evening.
Araucaria - Him
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An explicit "will" is suppressed in "if" clauses. For instance, "I buy a car tomorrow" doesn't sound right unless there is some sort of schedule involved, and since it's a future action, you'd say "I will buy a car tomorrow." Yet in an "if" clause, the "will" disappears: "If I buy a car tomorrow, then ..."

Now (getting to the point), in your case, the sentence "They would have been painted ..." is grammatically the past tense of "They will have been painted ..." But the sentence is in an "if" clause, so the "will" is suppressed, as is normal, and we get the past tense form of "They have been painted ...", which is "They had been painted ...".

I know, the "would" isn't really a logical past tense, but grammatically, it sometimes behaves as though it were.

So the answer to your question is this: The grammatical problem is that "will" wasn't deleted from the "if" clause.

Greg Lee
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  • Epistemic will -- the "future tense" -- is banned in hypothetical clauses. Consequently if will appears in an if-clause, it get a deontic 'be willing to/want to' reading. English teachers are prone to tell their students that you can't use the future tense in an if clause, for gods know what reason. This tends to confuse everybody. – John Lawler Feb 15 '15 at 02:12