ABSTRACT
The conditional is primarily used to refer to hypothetical situations and to indicate that something does not correspond to reality. It usually corresponds to English ‘would + verb’, e.g. Dann würde ich warten ‘Then I would wait’ (2), and often co-occurs in a sentence with words meaning ‘if ’ (e.g. wenn ‘if ’, als ob ‘as if ’): Wenn ich gewinnen würde ‘If I would win/If I won’ (8).67 Alternatively, instead of using the word wenn, the finite verb of the conditional can be brought to the beginning of the sentence to convey the same idea: Hätte ich das große Glück ‘If I was really lucky’ (18). There are many examples of this construction in our text, as the members of the forum are talking about a hypothetical situation: what they would do if they won a lot of money.
