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The perfect conditional is a verb form that describes something that might have happened in the past. It has two common uses: referring to something that could have happened but didn’t, and referring to something that might have happened but the speaker doesn’t know. It is formed by combining “would have” with the past participle of a verb. It is often found in the apodosis of a conditional sentence. The construction is similar in many Romance languages, but the Spanish conditional changes form depending on grammatical person and number.
In grammar, the perfect conditional is a verb form that describes something that might have happened in the past. It is the perfect or complete tense of the conditional mood. The perfect conditional occurs only in independent clauses and has two common uses. One refers to something that could have happened, but didn’t happen. The other refers to something that might have happened, but the speaker does not know whether it actually happened or not. The English conditional perfect is formed by combining the conditional “would have” with the past participle of a verb, as in “would have dance”.
An example of something that could have happened but didn’t happen is: “If Hugo knew Katie didn’t want the last cupcake, then he would have eaten it.” In this sentence, “she would have eaten” is the perfect conditional. Like many other sentences that use the perfect conditional, this sentence contains two clauses, both of which refer to things that didn’t actually happen. In this case, Hugo didn’t know that Katie didn’t want the last cupcake, so he didn’t eat it.
In more technical terms, the perfect conditional is often found in the apodosis of a conditional, or “if-then” sentence. The clause that begins with “then” is the apodosis and is an independent clause in the sense that it can stand on its own as a complete sentence: “Then she would have eaten it.” The clause that begins in “if” is known as the protasis and is a dependent clause. For example, “If Hugo had known Katie didn’t want the last cupcake” is not a complete sentence. While both apodosis and protasis refer in this sentence to things that did not happen, their grammatical constraint is different. The apodosis is in the conditional perfect form, while the protasis is in the subjunctive mood.
The second use of the perfect conditional has only one clause and is less grammatically complex. An example would be: “Alex probably would have finished dinner by half past six.” In this case, the speaker assumes that the action – Alex finishing dinner – was completed at some point in the past. There is still uncertainty, though, because the speaker has no solid proof of the state of Alex’s dinner.
The construction of the perfect conditional is similar in many other Romance languages. In Spanish, for example, it is the conditional of hablar – “would have” – plus the past participle. Unlike English, however, the Spanish conditional changes form depending on grammatical person and number. Yo habría, which means “I would have”, takes on a different form from tú habrías, which means “you would have”.
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