Native speakers and the use of conditional statements


I often hear people say that native English speakers don't make grammatical mistakes. But I don't understand the use of conditional statements as most people don't really pay much attention to the verb agreements of the two clauses, specially in the case of hypothetical present and future. Here are some examples:



The worst outcome would be if Apple wins a large judgment. Read more on The New Yorker


If the NATO troops do pull back, it would leave vast areas of the country unprotected including border areas with Pakistan. It would essentially mean the end of the strategy of trying to win hearts and minds by working with and protecting the local populations. From AP.



I have heard numerous native speakers use the same structure in spoken English. Can we say this is acceptable grammatically or is it me being a bit too thick to see the thin line?



Answer



The normal requirement is for the sentence to be either ‘The worst outcome will be if Apple wins a large judgment’ (it’s quite likely to happen) or ‘The worst outcome would be if Apple won a large judgment’ (it might possibly happen).


However, other combinations are possible in conditional sentences. In the ‘Cambridge Grammar of English’, Carter and McCarthy consider conditional clauses by the degree to which they refer to real or unreal situations, noticing that ‘a wide variety of patterns occur with real conditionals.’ An example of one of the patterns they illustrate is ‘If that’s on the disk, we should have it on our system.’ There, the verb in the if clause, (i)’s, is in the present tense and the verb in the main clause is the modal verb should followed by the plain form of have. Your example follows the same pattern. The verb in the if clause is present tense wins and the verb in the main clause is the modal verb would followed by the plain form of be.


The second example also follows this pattern. We can ignore for this purpose the emphatic use of do and say that the verb in the if clause, pull back, is in the present tense and that the verb in the main clause is would followed by the plain form of leave.


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