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He acts as if he owns (vs owned) the place?

Said to describe a popular boy at a school who behaves in a too confident way. -- his peers say that.

Both versions seem to be popular. Why is that so? Shouldn't it be grammar-wise "owned"?

ASDASD ASDASD
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2 Answers2

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There's been a significant usage shift over the past century.

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Presumably a century ago people thought of the as if component in this construction as a reference to a counterfactual situation (as in if I were a rich man). Today we tend to think in terms of "parallel" tenses in acts and owns. But consider...

"Please lend me £10..."
1: "If we were friends I'd lend it to you"
2: "It's not as if we were friends, so I won't"
3: "It's not as if we are friends, so I won't"

...where #2 doesn't start with It wasn't as if..., but I personally would definitely prefer #2 over #3, regardless of the apparent mismatch of tenses. I don't have any special preference for owns or owned in OP's cited example, though. They both sound fine to me.

Thanks to @Jack for a Wikipedia link to where it says...

In many languages, counterfactuality is marked by past tense morphology.

FumbleFingers
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  • Very interesting! Like you, I have no preference for owns/owned, but in the lending example, I have a clear preference for #3 over #2. I don’t perceive that as a counterfactual statement at all – the tense in that example is semantic to me (i.e., “It’s not as if we were friends at the time” vs “It’s not as if we’re friends right now”), and the subjunctive is blocked (“It’s not as if he was my friend”, but not “It’s not as if he were my friend”). More commonly, I’d use like, where the preference is even stronger: “It’s not like we were friends right now” is actually ungrammatical to me. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 07 '23 at 12:13
  • Yes, there's obviously an area of uncertainty here. Which I think stands to reason, given the charted usage shift. Different speakers will lean to a greater or lesser extent to the "Past Tense = conterfactual" or the "Tense consistency is paramount" side of things. I lean towards your perrspective with that *right now* example, but I find I can tolerate As college roommates we were quite close - but it's not as if we were friends today, so I refused to lend him the money. – FumbleFingers Feb 07 '23 at 12:26
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Although 'owned' can be used to mean the present status of something that is owned (eg the house is owned by him), when it has a direct object the verb has to use the correct tense, and so should use the same tense as the word 'acts':

  • He acts as if he owns the place.
  • He acted as if he owned the place.

And of course, the tense of the entire sentence should reflect whether you were talking about how he acted in the past, or how he acts presently, or in general.

The idiom does have many more variations though, and where it could become more complex (and cause confusion among native speakers) is if you introduced a hypothetical into it, for example, "you would think he owned the place from the way he acts". In such a case, 'owned' is the correct tense for a hypothetical statement. I can't really explain any apparent major shift in usage except to say that (i) sometimes native speakers do get idioms wrong, and (ii) possibly the hypothetical nature of it is confusing some.

Astralbee
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