What if / Afni Anida Adnan

One of the most interesting features of the English language is perhaps the way the conditional ‘if’ is documented and subsequently, expressed in the language. The conditional ‘if’ features as the main premise of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, titled as such (‘If’) and can be found in the lyrics of songs, such as Beyonce’s ‘If I were a boy’, and George Benson’s ‘Nothing’s Gonna Change my love for you’ (If I had to live my life without you near me and if the road ahead is not so easy). The conditional ‘If’ in English, is probably the one grammatical feature which is formed using tenses which are contextual, more for the purpose of reflecting the intention and feelings of the speaker, as opposed to most sentences where the tense used is mainly to indicate the timeframe of the events taking place. The conditional if, when taken into account with great scrutiny, is a lexical feature with only one function and when translated to Bahasa Malaysia, simply means ‘kalau/jika/ jikalau’. Interestingly however, in English, this seemingly simple feature takes four different forms, and each form is a combination of the lexical ‘if’, followed by dependent clauses which are in four fixed tenses, depending on the type of conditional one wishes to use.