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Can you please look at this sentence.

"Andy knew the risks. I cannot believe he would have chanced it."

So, we understand that the person is complaining that although Andy knew about the risks of doing something, he did not care about those risks, and he did it and he experienced or caused a problem".

If the sentence means to say this, why does it use the structure "I cannot believe he would have chanced it", instead of "I cant believe he chanced it"

Thanks

M.A.R.
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Yunus
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    What is v3? I don't get it. – JPhi1618 Jan 15 '18 at 20:14
  • @JPhi perhaps the lazy person's way of indicating pp (No offense there OP :) Learners learn to deal with three inflections of the verb that matter: The simple form do, past form did, and past participle done, hence "v3". I don't get why the present participle doing and third person singular does are treated separately. – M.A.R. Jan 15 '18 at 21:26

2 Answers2

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It is possible that your understanding of the situation is correct: the speaker knows that Andy did in fact 'chance it'. In this case Luke Sawczak's reading is likely: the would expresses a sort of 'fuzziness' about the speaker's reaction to a known past event.

But it is also possible that the would expresses the speaker's inference respecting an uncertain past event—that is, the speaker does not know whether Andy took the risk or not, but considers it unlikely:

A: Did Andy actually send that letter?
B: I don't know. But he knew the risks. I cannot believe he would have chanced it.

StoneyB on hiatus
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In this construction, the conditional is probably expressing something about the person's character. It ventures an opinion about the ability to predict their behaviour.

I can't believe that, given who Andy is and what he knows, he would act the way he did in such a situation.

Your version is absolutely correct as well and expresses doubt about the reality of the action.

That's in theory. In practice, we rarely worry about the precise implications of the realis/irrealis signifiers. The simple past could be used to express an opinion on character ("I can't believe he did that" even when you are perfectly convinced that he did), and the conditional can be used when you're in doubt about the reality.

Actually, the combination of the conditional and the past perfect in this case expresses that fuzziness pretty well. The tense doesn't make much literal sense since the past could only be used from the present perspective on the action, which is real, but the conditional suggests that it's hypothetical.

In any case, to restate, the intended effect is probably to question your assumptions about the person's character.

Luke Sawczak
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