Hi there!
What's the difference between these sentences? Do they all carry the same meaning?
He talked to alice like an adult.
He talked to alice as if he was an adult.
He talked to alice as if he had been an adult.
Thanks very much.
All are grammatically possible, and, depending on the situation,
could mean the same.
There are, however, a number of issues relating to #2 and #3: although 'as if' represents, in origin, a hypothetical conditional, many contemporary users do not follow the strict sequence of tenses that this would generally necessitate, substituting indicative for subjunctive tense-forms. Others, however, especially if adopting a more formal/traditional style, stick closely to the typical conditional sentence tense-patterns. Hence, with actual present reference, we might get either
[1]
He talks to me as if I'm stupid.
(popular contemporary)
or
[1a]
He talks to me as if I were stupid.
(traditional/formal. Cf. second conditional
as he would do if I were...)
And similarly, with actual past reference, either
[2]
He talked to me as if I was stupid.
or
[2a]
He talked to me as if I had been stupid.
(CF. 3rd conditional
as he would have done if I had been...)
The problem with the use of the formal/traditional pattern is that it lacks a means of distinguishing between two significantly different meanings of sentences such as [2a], i.e. between
He talked to me as if I had been stupid (i.e. at the time at which we were speaking).
and
He talked to me as if I had been stupid (at some
previous time, e.g. to have committed some foolish action prior to our conversation).
and, for this reason, the popular form is probably to be preferred.
However, given that, in reality, the two systems are likely to coexist for some time to come, there is always likely, especially where the main verb is a past tense form, to be some risk of ambiguity, usually leaving the listener to decide, based on the usual combination of situational inference and common sense, on the intended set of time relations.
