Abstract

Why do we say If you come tomorrow, I’ll help you rather than If you came tomorrow, I’d help you? Is the difference simply grammatical, or does it reveal something about how speakers perceive and construct possibilities?

English conditionals do much more than express hypothetical relationships. We use them to make promises, issue threats, decline invitations politely, express regret, and imagine alternative realities. Yet traditional grammar instruction often reduces these constructions to a set of tense-based rules.

Drawing on acceptability judgements and written verbalisations from first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) English speakers, this talk explores how individuals interpret conditional meanings in context, particularly their perceptions of likelihood, temporal relationships, and communicative intentions. Through illustrative learner responses, I examine what verbalisations can reveal about grammatical understanding, where L1 and L2 interpretations may converge or diverge, and what these insights mean for second language teaching.

Ultimately, the talk asks a deceptively simple question: When we use the same words, are we imagining the same world?

Bio

Dr Ivy Wong is Assistant Professor and Associate Head of the Department of English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Shue Yan University. She was previously a Bowland Research Fellow at the University of York. Her research focuses on second language acquisition, Cognitive Linguistics-informed grammar instruction, psycholinguistics, and Bayesian approaches to language research. Her research on English conditionals has been supported by the Research Grants Council’s Faculty Development Scheme (FDS) and the Bowland Research Fellowship, while her work on English prepositions was funded by the Standing Committee on Language Education and Research (SCOLAR). Her work has appeared in leading international journals, including Language Learning, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and TESOL Quarterly.

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