Thank you for explaining your grammatical analysis of this sentence in my posting: “When you’re done, I’m sure that you’d have already acquired a clear systems view of punctuation in English and can put it to good use in your expositions.” I can appreciate your doubts about its grammatical correctness. It’s admittedly a sentence that doesn’t yield to simple, cut-and-dried analysis considering its informal, conversational structure.
In its normal form, of course, that sentence should read as follows: “I’m sure that when you’re done, you’d have already acquired a clear systems view of punctuation in English and can put it to good use in your expositions.” In this form, we have a sentence that consists of the following components:
1.
The main clause: “I’m sure”
2.
The subordinate clause: “that when you’re done, you’d have already acquired a clear systems view of punctuation in English and can put it to good use in your expositions.”
When viewed from the total framework of a complex sentence, I frankly can’t see any grammatical flaw in that construction. The clause introduced by “that” is neither a conditional clause nor a future perfect clause but a declarative sentence, so it’s use of the auxiliary verb “would” as the past tense of “will” looks perfectly grammatical to me. The use of “already” in the sense of “by that time” isn’t superfluous at all in that construction; in fact, the absence of “already” would make that clause—it can be taken as a sentence in its own right, by the way—grammatically suspect if not downright defective. Take a look: “
When you’re done, you’d have acquired a clear systems view of punctuation in English and can put it to good use in your expositions.” Without the adverb “already,” the sentence gives the misleading sense that the acquisition of “a clear systems view of punctuation in English” was instantaneous rather than as a result of an extended process that was completed after some time was expended on it.
You think that being nonconditional, that sentence should be using “you’ll” (the contracted “you will”) instead of “you’d” (the contracted “you would”). I don’t think so. There are two distinct situations, of course, in which “will” instead of “would” will be grammatically valid in that construction. They are as follows:
1. When the sentence or clause is in the future perfect tense. In this tense, the action will have been completed—finished or “perfected”—at some point in the future. The form of this tense is as follows: subject + “will have”/“shall have” + past participle.” Sentences in this tense are, of course, commonly introduced by such expressions as “by,” “by the time,” “before,” and “until,” as in this reconstruction of that clause (shown here as a sentence simply for clarity’s sake): “
By the time you’re done, you’ll have already acquired a clear systems view of punctuation in English and can put it to good use in your expositions.” Note that my original sentence is introduced by “when” and not by any of the time markers for the future perfect tense. Also, I don’t see any grammatical impediment to the usage of “already” in that future-perfect sentence. (Click this link to
EnglishTenses.com for a discussion of the future perfect tense.)
2. When the sentence is in the first conditional (real possibility) form. Recall that in a first conditional sentence, an “if” clause states the condition in the present simple tense, is followed by a comma, then followed by the result clause in the form “will + base form of the verb.” If we put the clause in question in the first conditional, it would take this form: “
If you’re done, you’ll have already acquired a clear systems view of punctuation in English and can put it to good use in your expositions.” I’m inclined to believe that the first conditional is what you had in mind when you said that my sentence should have used “you’ll” instead of “you’d.” (Click this link to a previous posting in the Forum on
“The four types of conditional sentences.”) However, in the absence of an “if”-clause, my original sentence isn’t a first conditional sentence to begin with.
Based on the foregoing discussion, I’m afraid that your analysis of the usage of “already” and your criterion for the usage of “will” vs. “would,” while grammatically valid in themselves, don’t constitute a relevant and valid justification for your assertion that my sentence erroneously uses the adverb “already” and misuses “you’d” in place of “you’ll.”
