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Ardavan
Nothing you could have done would have changed the course of events
"Nothing you could have done would have changed the course of events."
it seems the above sentence is a conditional type 3. My concern is about the "nothing" at the beginning of the sentence and the way the condition sentence is written without any comma and conjunction (if, provided, in case, etc.).
P.S.
It is an example in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.
16 ก.ค. 2017 เวลา 16:42
คำตอบ · 4
2
Hi. 1. There's no room for commas between the Subject (--Nothing you could have done ...) and the Verb (+ would have changed...) as well as between the Verb and the Object (+ the events).
2.
---Nothing would have changed the events
---Nothing (...) would have changed the events
---Nothing (---that you could have done---) would have changed the events
We could transform it as ---"Even if you had done anything (that) you could (do/ have done), this would have not changed the course of events (anyway)".
I just hope you understand your issue.
16 กรกฎาคม 2017
Perhaps you're more knowledgeable than I regarding this, but in the example you give here, "we had booked our flight earlier" is a single condition. In the question you ask, "Nothing you could have done" specifies ALL POSSIBLE CONDITIONS. Again, this doesn't seem to fit into the definition of a conditional, as I understand it, but grammar is not my strong point.
Is "You couldn't have done anything to change the course of events." a conditional? Because, to me, it means exactly the same thing as your original statement.
18 กรกฎาคม 2017
it emphasizes that something will happen, would happen or would have happened whatever the condition.
For examples:
Even if we had booked our flight earlier, it wouldn't have been cheaper.
18 กรกฎาคม 2017
I'm not a grammarian, but I don't see how this can be a conditional. A conditional requires a specific condition in order to have a particular outcome. In this statement, ANY condition (anything that the person might have done) would lead to the SAME outcome (no possible change in the course of events).
An equivalent statement to this could be: "You couldn't have done anything to change the course of events."
16 กรกฎาคม 2017
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Ardavan
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