[Grammar] Progressive verb form in the "if" part of a conditional.

[Edwalker]

Hello,

I wrote this conditional sentence about a cat which managed to get itself trapped on our balcony:

If the cat had been wearing an address tag, we would have known who to contact.


This sounds perfectly natural to me, but I cannot find any examples in Practical English Usage (Michael Swan) of a conditional with a progressive verb form in the "if" part.

Is my sentence really incorrect? Do I need to change it to "If the cat was wearing...."?

Thank you.

 

[Rover_KE]

It's fine.

 

[GoesStation]

I wouldn't like it with the past continuous, but I wouldn't be surprised to see other Americans use it.

 

[jutfrank]

As a teacher of this sort of stuff, I have to say was wearing is wrong, no matter who might use it. (GoesStation meant to say 'past continuous', by the way.)

Because it's an unreal past conditional, it needs past perfect. In this case, the past perfect is also continuous, as fits the meaning.

 

[GoesStation]

Because it's an unreal past conditional, it needs past perfect. In this case, the past perfect is also continuous, as fits the meaning.

I've noticed lately that past perfect forms are used less and less in American English. Many younger speakers apparently find past simple forms perfectly natural. The substitution looks wrong to me, and I certainly wouldn't encourage learners to use it, but I suspect it will be widely accepted in decades to come.

 

[Edwalker]

Many thanks for these replies

I realised this morning, that I made errors in my original question. I asked about the use of the Past Progressive verb form, but in my example sentence I actually used the Past Perfect Progressive form.

I then asked if the correct form should be "..was wearing...", which, being the Past Progressive form, also does not follow any construction found in the conditionals section of Practical English Usage. I should have typed "..had worn.." here.

So, to get this straight in my head:

If the cat was wearing......[This is Past Progressive, which does not work here].

If the cat wore.....[This is Past Simple, which is not liked by some in this situation, but is becoming more popular].

If the cat had worn......[This is Past Perfect, which is what I thought I should use here according to the examples included in Swan's book].

If the cat had been wearing....[This is Past Perfect Progressive, which although not included in the conditionals section of my grammar book, is still a type of Past Perfect, which means it is fine here. In fact it is better here than Past Perfect "as it suits the meaning".

Is this all clear and correct?

I very much appreciate your help.

I'm interested in the difference between "had been wearing" and "had worn" in this context.

I think we prefer "had been wearing" because "to wear" is a verb which cannot happen instantaneously? After all, if we said "If the cat had been jumping....." it would mean that it had jumped more than once. Is this correct?

Thank you once again.

 

[jutfrank]

The only correct sentence is the one in post #1, which uses past perfect progressive. Past simple and past perfect simple are not correct. Think of it like this:

Fact: The cat was not wearing a tag [past progressive]
Counterfact: If the cat had been wearing a tag ... [past perfect progressive]

You can see that the 'counterfact' is shifted back from past progressive to past perfect progressive. That's what creates the meaning, as it were. The progressive bit remains unchanged. You need the progressive aspect in this particular example because of the meaning of the sentence. In other unreal past conditionals, the past perfect simple suffices.

Don't worry about what's not in the Swan book. He doesn't have the space or inclination to go into every possibility. Just because something is not mentioned there doesn't mean it's incorrect.

 

[Edwalker]

I get it now. Thank you so much for your patience. ��

 

[emsr2d2]

Edwalker, bear in mind in future posts, that we don't capitalise the names of tenses.