. . . ; she [Helen] brought my coffee and bread. “Come, eat something,” she said; but I [Jane] put both away from me, feeling as if a drop or a crumb would have choked me in my present condition. (Jane Eyre)
There’s no mention that Jane had what Helen had brought in the book, yet the phrase ‘would have choked’ implies that Jane took those things without choking, doesn’t it?
Answer
What is involved here is an interplay of present and past forms of verbs which is complicated by the facts that a) what we call ‘past’ forms are employed both for past reference and for hypothetical modes, and b) modal verbs don’t behave quite the same way as ordinary verbs.
If I eat what she has brought me, it will choke me. … You are contemplating eating what is before you in the present, and predicting the outcome, so all verbs employ present forms: has is a present form, employed with a perfect construction to indicate a past event with effects in the present, and will is a present form, indicating a future consequence expected in the present.
If I ate what she has brought me, it would choke me. … You have, in the present, decided not to eat what is before you, and explaining why. The past forms of eat and will are employed to indicate that they are counterfactual conditionals: things which are not true, though they might be.
If I ate what she had brought me, it would choke me. … You are looking back on the events narrated in Sentence 1 and narrating, in the present, what you thought then, in the past, so you backshift all the present forms into their past forms.
And now this is the hard one:
If I had eaten what she had brought me, it would have choked me. … You are looking back on the events narrated in Sentence 2 and narrating, in the present, what you decided then, in the past, and why. To backshift past forms in conditionals you employ a past perfect form for your IF clause and the modal past form + the present perfect form of your lexical verb for your consequence clause.
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