I agree/I would agree ?

What is the difference between: "I agree with you on that" and "I would agree with you on that"? What's that "would" doing in the 2nd sentence?

first, if you both agree about something
second, you may agree

check your mail abhishek

sdomermpc said:

The first, if you both agree about something.
The second, you may agree.

Check your mail abhishek.

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I have no idea if this is a genuine response (apologies if it is but it just looks a little suspect) but if it is then in future "sdomermpc" please state that you are not a teacher/native speaker and please use correct capitalisation and punctuation.

I don't agree with your suggestions. In BrE, "I would agree with you" simply means "I agree". If it were "I would agree with you if you changed your answer" then it means you don't agree. I honestly don't know why we sometimes add "would" to the positive sentence.

emsr2d2 said:

...I honestly don't know why we sometimes add "would" to the positive sentence.

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I did an OU course that was very keen on the idea of 'hedging'. I think there's a very distantly implicit (almost negligible) subordinate clause: 'I would agree [if my opinion had any value - but I know it hasn't]''. Thie makes it a bit like the modal in 'Would you pass the salt?'.

There's another use of this modal which I find less explicable:

A: Who's the boss around here?
B: That would be me.

b

BobK said:

I did an OU course that was very keen on the idea of 'hedging'. I think there's a very distantly implicit (almost negligible) subordinate clause: 'I would agree [if my opinion had any value - but I know it hasn't]''. Thie makes it a bit like the modal in 'Would you pass the salt?'.b

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I would say that's right. I've been having the devil's time trying to teach keannu about this use of 'would' in another thread. :evil: I was going to mention hedging, but thought it might be too obscure.

could actually make you a bit crazy and depressed

My contribution to the discussion of this use of "would" can be found in the last few posts in the above thread.

Raymott said:

I've been having the devil's time trying to teach keannu about this use of 'would' in another thread.

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I would think you're in for a long slog.

I initially thoght that the name of Raymott's link was his text. ;-)

b

BobK said:

I initially thoght that the name of Raymott's link was his text. ;-)b

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Hmm, I guess that's because it's not underlined. It'll probably take a few more weeks to get used to the differences of this new layout. (But it is a rather apposite misunderstanding).