English Grammar — Lecture Notes

Unit 3 · Past, conditional & inversion

The past perfect places one past action before another: two things happened, but one happened earlier. It is the tense of “earlier history” inside a past sentence.

Signal words like “by the time”, “already” and “just” often point to this tense in written English. When you see them, ask which action came first.

The past perfect also appears in reported speech: she said she had finished the assignment the day before.

If-clauses come in three shades — contrary to present, past, or future fact — and each shade changes the verb in both halves of the sentence.

Type 1 keeps things real: “If it rains, we will stay in.” Type 2 imagines the present: “If it rained, we would stay in.” Type 3 rewinds the past: “If it had rained, we would have stayed in.”

Quick check: “When she rang, I had already finished dinner.” If that was your answer, you have the sequence right.

Example: By the time we arrived, the train had left.

The subjunctive uses “were” for every person in hypothetical statements: if I were you, I would review tonight.

Note that polite expressions like “If I were you…” are fixed, even in informal speech — nobody says “If I was you” in careful writing.

The same pattern survives in set phrases: “God save the King”, “far be it from me” — fossils of an older subjunctive system.

Inversion flips the subject and the auxiliary after negative adverbials such as “never”, “rarely” and “hardly”.

Never have I seen such a mess — the auxiliary comes before the subject, not after it.

Compare: “I have never seen” (normal word order) versus “Never have I seen” (inverted for emphasis after the fronted adverbial).

The same pattern appears after “only then”, “not only” and “under no circumstances” in formal writing.

Common mistake: using “would” in the if-half. Write “If I had known”, not “If I would have known”.

Tone tip: inversion sounds formal — perfect for essays, reports and exams; in everyday speech, prefer the normal word order.

Vocabulary note: “hardly” and “scarcely” are already negative, so they take “any”, never “some” — “hardly anything”, not “hardly nothing”.

Remember that the past perfect is optional when the sequence is obvious from “before” or “after” — prefer the simple past for clarity instead.

Practise: rewrite five sentences from your last essay using inversion or the past perfect, then check the verb agreement in both clauses.

Challenge: summarise this unit in three sentences — one per theme — using each structure at least once.

Review questions

1. Which signal words usually accompany the past perfect?

2. Rewrite “She didn’t call and then I left” using “by the time”.

3. Why is “If I would have known” wrong, and what is the correct form?

4. Turn “I have never heard such a song” into an inverted sentence.

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