If you could change something – anything – what would you change?
I wish I was taller.
I wish I had a beautiful singing voice.
What else?
Well, I wish that I hadn’t eaten so much chocolate last night.
You regret that you had too much?
Yeah, my stomach hurts now.
But it was just so good!
When we express wishes and regrets, we say things that aren’t true.
For example, you wish you hadn’t eaten so much chocolate,
but the reality is that you did eat a lot of chocolate.
Right, because the whole point is to say how things would be nice if they were different.
Right.
Also, while we might expect wants and even hopes to come true,
wishes are either impossible or very unlikely.
Yeah, I won’t magically get taller.
No.
And you can’t change the past, either.
Unfortunately.
Because of this, wishes and regrets are in what we call the 'unreal mood'.
That makes sense.
We’ll get into a special feature of the unreal mood in a minute,
but first let’s talk about the structure of wishes and regrets.
Okay.
There are two parts to these types of sentences.
The first part is the Wish Expression.
You mean ‘I wish that…’.
Or ‘she wishes’ or ‘we wish’ …
Yep, and another good one is ‘if only’.
The second part is the unreal clause; it states how we wish things were different.
What’s a clause again?
It’s a group of words that looks like it's a sentence on its own.
Check these out.
Oh yeah, those could each be their own sentences.
They could be,
but instead, we combine them with wish expressions in order to form the sentences we want to make.
Like “I wish that I had never met that jerk!”
Or “I wish we all lived on Mars.”
Or “If only she had called me sooner.”
That one looks like a conditional sentence.
In addition to using ‘if’, that’s because one half of most conditionals is an unreal clause.
In fact, we can turn this into a conditional sentence if we simply add the other half:
a result clause.
Like “If only she had called me sooner, I would’ve been able to help.”
Just like that.
We can keep the word ‘only’, or we could take it out if we preferred.
But without the result clause, we need to keep ‘only’ to express a wish or regret.
That’s just how that expression works.
Got it.
Are there any other wish expressions?
Yeah, we could say “I’d rather” or “I’d prefer if”.
Hm.
I see how that’s expressing a wish, but …
But what?
But is that still ‘unreal’?
I mean, it’s possible to make that change, right?
That’s a good point.
But we still use the Unreal Mood if we feel like it’s impossible.
In cases like these, maybe the speaker is very frustrated or annoyed.
Oh,
so they might be thinking: if that hasn’t changed yet, maybe it’ll never change,
and that’s why they’re frustrated or annoyed.
Something like that, yeah.
The same goes for this expression: ‘It’s time’.
Yeah, I imagine the person saying that sentence is really frustrated.
Probably.
One more wish expression is ‘imagine if’.
Okay, this particular example isn’t really a wish because we’re glad it didn’t happen,
but we’re still talking about something that didn’t happen which means it’s unreal,
so we use the same structure.
We have a lot of different sentences here.
Yeah, we could use this structure to express things like regret,
fantasies, disappointment, complaints, criticism, and relief.
They’re all ways to talk about how things might’ve been different.
Yep.
Take a look at those verbs.
For the ones that talk about hypothetical present situations, we use the past form.
Huh, that’s weird.
And for the counterfactual past situations, we use the past perfect verb.
Okay … why would we do that?
It’s a process called backshifting, and for some reason,
that’s just what we do for all unreal structures.
'Back'-what?
‘Backshifting’.
It means a verb is expressed further in the past than it actually means.
Okay, so … the future looks more like the present,
present verbs are expressed in the past tense,
and the past is shifted back to, what, super-past?
Uh, kinda, yeah.
We saw which tense we use for past meaning in our earlier examples.
Can you remember what it was?
Um … oh, past perfect, right?
That’s right!
A lot of times, we start with simple verbs like these, and we just shift that word further back into the past.
That’s easy enough.
But what if the verb isn’t so simple?
If there are multiple words in the verb string – as is the case when auxiliary verbs are included –
we only make the first word more past,
and the rest of the verb string generally remains the same.
That doesn't seem too hard.
No.
Some of those auxiliary verbs might be modals.
‘Will’ turns to ‘would’, and ‘can’ turns to ‘could’.
If we need to shift a modal back further, we add ‘have’ after it.
Oh, like ‘would’ve’, ‘could’ve’, and ‘should’ve’.
Yep.
One last thing: usually the past of 'am' and 'is' is 'was'.
But if we’re using both the unreal mood and a formal tone,
we use 'were' instead, as in “I wish I were famous!”
That sounds a little bit weird to me.
Well, it’s good to know because you might read it or hear some people use that.
But most of the time, it’s fine if you say ‘was’.
That's good!
To recap: we start with a wish expression;
next we state an unreal situation,
and the verb needs to be backshifted.
Got it.
I’m ready to try an example.
Alright, go ahead.
I’ll start with ‘if only’.
Alright.
What’s the situation? Something that’s not true.
I can fly.
Yeah, that would be cool.
Now backshift the verb.
Okay, so we change ‘fly’ to ‘flew’.
No, wait!
The first part of the verb is ‘can’, so that’s the word we need to shift.
“I could fly.”
Yeah, that's it!
“If only I could fly.”
By the way, you could use a different wish expression, and the result would be essentially the same.
Cool!
Yeah, wishes and regrets don't seem too hard.
The trickiest part might be the backshifting, but once I get that down, it should be a breeze!
Glad to hear it!