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Originally Posted by M56 Conditional sentences are used to describe the consequences of a specific action, or the dependency between events or conditions. |
I'm sorry, I was unclear. I'll see if I can find a form of words we can agree on. Perhaps:
Sometimes IF statements are used to present cause and effect:
1. If you do that again, I'll box your ears.
Sometimes, to express an inference:
2. If MrP was the man you saw in the car at 6am, he can't have been the person who stole my bike at 6.01.
Statements like #1 sit happily inside the traditional '0/1/2/3 conditional' framework; statements like #2 may not. (There are other kinds of IF statement too, of course.)
We can demonstrate that #2 isn't a type 2 conditional, by the way, by attempting to substitute 'were' for 'was': we find that the subjunctive doesn't work, because of the specific past time reference.
It seems to me that we can analyse the original sentence in one of two ways:
3. If he'll kill himself, he'll kill us.
a) It expresses an inference, in the style of #2, in which case the traditional 'types 0/1/2/3' rules don't apply; or, if you don't accept my distinction:
b) 'Will' does not primarily express futurity; it simply means 'is prepared to'. In which case, #3 can only be taken as a modalised type 1. (But I'd suggest that this is more problematical than treating the sentence as an inference that doesn't need to 'obey the rules'.)
MrP