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Today, I read a tweet where the used conditional structure did not fit any of the conditional types taught in the language books I've read.

if I would have relied on the Fake News of CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, washpost or nytimes, I would have had ZERO chance winning WH [sic]

Basically, if I understand it well, it's structured as:

if (subject) would have (past participle) ..., (subject) would have (past participle)... .

I tried to search for conditional types and most sites listed Zero, Type 1, 2, 3 and mixed conditionals, but unfortunately, I didn't find any that resembles the quoted tweet.

Is 'if I would have ..., I would have ...' a valid/correct conditional?

If it is not, how bad it sounds to a native English speaker? How frequently is it used incorrectly?

Vince Varga
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    We've had this discussion here before. It's incredibly common in some American dialects. It sounds really wrong to speakers of some other dialects. – Peter Shor Jun 06 '17 at 14:24
  • I think it's actually a simplification of the incredibly complex structure for conditionals in English (they greatly simplify it for ESL, and people still get confused). And it hardly introduces any ambiguity. Does this mean it will become mainstream American English in another 50 years? I wouldn't be surprised. – Peter Shor Jun 06 '17 at 14:28
  • All it means is that if A was true, B becomes true. If A in theory existed as a fact, so too would it result in B existing as a fact. However, if you use tweets as models of language, and you do not notice how poorly this typist uses language, good luck at the washpost. – Yosef Baskin Jun 06 '17 at 14:31
  • See this related question. – Peter Shor Jun 06 '17 at 14:34
  • And here is an Ngram that I think shows this construction becoming more common in AmE. There are valid uses of If I would have, which I believe are roughly constant in AmE and BrE, but there's an additional increasing component in AmE. It's still dwarfed by the correct grammar "If I had ..." – Peter Shor Jun 06 '17 at 14:49
  • My own theory is that the would have in the protasis is an orthographic back-formation from -da, an evolving subjunctive clitic which generalizes the -da in the apodosis: "If I'da known you was coming I'da baked a cake." – StoneyB on hiatus Jun 06 '17 at 14:58

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