Universite d’antananarivo ecole normale superieure

1.1.2- A semantic overview of the major types of English conditionals

According to Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999), there are three main types of English conditional sentences: factual, future (or predictive) and imaginative (or subjunctive) and under each main type, there are a couple of subgroups to further categorize different conditional sentence types. In this section, however, only the most frequently encountered ones are assessed. They are:

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  Generic factual (type zero)
  

• 
  Strong condition and result (type one)
  

• 
  Present counterfactual (type two)
  

• 
  Past counterfactual (type three)