English Language & Usage Asked by Mido Mido on December 14, 2020
I have been told that ‘unless’ can’t be used in hypothetical clauses as follows:
Unless Ann had studied hard, she would have failed the exam.
My question is, why is using ‘unless’ in the conditional clause above unacceptable?
You're correct, that sentence
is ungrammatical. OK, that happens. What makes it interesting is that, normally, unless means if not. And if you use if not instead of unless, everything works just fine:
But it clearly doesn't work with unless. The effect of this sentence on a native speaker is telling. The meaning is reasonable but the parsing sends up a flag. Frankly, I don't know why. It must be something about putting the negation and the if together in one lexical item, but why it's forbidden here is very puzzling.
Correct answer by John Lawler on December 14, 2020
Because we think of a hypothetical situation as not happening yet, or hard to happen and for this reason, no one can be sure whether the situation can happen or not, "unless" doesn't feel appropriate to use for describing the hypothetical situation.
Answered by Lee Seok Min on December 14, 2020
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