What is “conditional phrase”?

[opooo]

not a teacher

 

[Tarheel]

not a teacher

I get that, but what's the question?

 

[opooo]

I get that, but what's the question?

I don’t know the meaning of it, but I guess It’s a grammar word. The following is where it’s from. “Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, “The intersection of memory upon imagination”and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus"--a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.”

 

[opooo]

I don’t know the meaning of it, but I guess It’s a grammar word. The following is where it’s from. “Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, “The intersection of memory upon imagination”and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus"--a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.”

and I also have two questions.
1.what is “thus-and-thus”?
2.what gramma component does “burdened” do in sentence? is it adverbial modifier?


“Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, “The intersection of memory upon imagination”and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus"--a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.”

and maybe I’ll reply to you tomorrow, too late here, sry!

 

[Tarheel]

We have gone from one extreme to the other. First, there was no question in the OP. That was followed by a blizzard of words.

The point she was making is that the way she uses the language is different in public than it is at home. (That should not have been a surprise, but apparently it was.)

 

[Barque]

1.what is “thus-and-thus”?

A filler. You can take it as "this and that". He probably couldn't recall exactly what he said and he used "thus and thus" as a substitute.

2.what gramma component does “burdened” do in sentence? is it adverbial modifier?

I don't know what an adverbial modifier is. He was saying his speech was burdened, or affected, or weighed down, by complex things like "nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, and conditional phrases", which he'd normally not have used in casual speech with his family members.

He's saying he used a lot of long words and complex structures that he wouldn't have used in casual speech.