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Is there any difference between these two sentences? Is one of them wrong?

  1. Even if a ship did show up

  2. Even if a ship showed up

herisson
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Renan
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    For most purposes, there's no difference. But note that *did* provides emphasis for the verb *show up, so you couldn't include that if you actually wanted to emphasise that what might show up could be a ship rather than, say, a submarine. To convey that emphasis, you'd need to stress ship, which you can't reasonably do at the same time as stressing did*. – FumbleFingers Mar 15 '17 at 18:38

1 Answers1

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The first would work in a sentence in this context: I don't think ships dock here now. Even if a ship did show up at this pier, it would probably not take passengers on board.

The second would work in the following context: There are so many of us, we won't fit in that sailboat. Even if a ship showed up, we would hardly fi

Jane Mitchell
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