Conditional Clauses and Will

It is well known that the present simple tense is chosen in a conditional clause even if it has a future reference with will in the main clause. The choice of the present simple tense has long been regarded as tense simplification. This article suggests an alternative view to the traditional analysis. This research claims that the choice of the present simple tense is not an omission of will in the clauses, but that the absence of will has its own reason. To deal with the issue properly, we need to distinguish between assumption and prediction. The absence of will in an if clause is to indicate that the protasis of a conditional is an assumption, not a prediction. In the special case of a predictional will in an if clause, such as If the play will be cancelled, let’s not go, it is claimed in this paper that the one conditional is a compressed version of two conditionals. When it is decompressed back, we can see that each protasis of the two conditionals is an assumption.