In teaching English grammar to Polish students I have encountered many problems when explaining the meaning of conditional sentences. There exists a longstanding tradition of describing conditionals in pedagogic grammars (e.g. Onions 1904, Eckersley and Eckersley 1960, Thompson and Martinet 1960, Graver 1971, Murphy 1994). These focus on discussing formal differences in three major types of such sentences:

The description centres around the verb forms used in such sentences, whereas the analysis of meaning is reduced to an absolute minimum. Mostly they point out the difference of verb forms used in order to mark time reference as well as to stress the reality versus unreality relation in conditionals. Hardly any examples of other combinations are mentioned, and even if they are, they are conveniently called “mixed” and treated as departures from the formulas quoted above. The most common pedagogic result of such an approach is that students become appropriately “mixed” and try to avoid producing sentences that may differ from the rule.

Conditionals bring about a number of questions. Their logical structure has been discussed since Aristotle and the complexity of the problem as well as the variety of interpretations was put into words by Cicero: “(…) ‘If it is day, it shines’, how great a contest there is; – Diodorus has one opinion, Philo another, Chrysippus a third. Need I say more?”.