Title says it all. 
Thanks.
If can, though uncommonly, take a gerund phrase like “having any questions” rather than a clause as its “object” (that’s not the proper term, but I have no idea how else to describe what a subordinating conjunction subordinates). However, it’s a particularly awkward usage, when “you have” in place of “having” requires only one more letter (two more characters, counting the space) and is less tortured syntax.
Incorrect.
Try –
If you have any questions …
If there are any questions …
“If” introduces a subordinate clause and you need a subject and a verb in that clause. “Having” is neither of those.
Hmm…
“If having any questions is wrong, I don’t want to be right.”
I think folks would agree that this is absurd, but not awkward or wrong. The difference is that “If” begins a clause in which “having any questions” is the subject.
In the example sentence, “having any questions” isn’t the subject, since there is no verb that agrees with it. “Feel” is second-person: it’s telling the listener what to do.
Consider the following sentence:
“If Bob, please feel free to ask.”
That’s got the same problem: the noun doesn’t agree with any verb.
But what about:
“If eating fish, choose a white wine.”
Somehow that sounds much less awkward to me, yet has the same construction.
I’m baffled.
Daniel
As with many things we say in English, certain words are understood even though not stated. That sentence is short for “If (you are) eating fish, (you are instructed to) choose a white wine.” (That said, it’s more common to see this as “When eating fish…”)
Likewise, the OP sentence could be construed as “If (you are) having any questions, please feel free to ask.” It’s probably not grammatically incorrect, but it’s the type of thing you don’t normally hear from native speakers of English. As mentioned above, “If you have…” or “If there are…” are the typical ways to state it.
It’s wrong, because there’s something left out. A participle like “having” needs to refer to something, and there’s nothing there to refer to. “If” needs to introduce a clause, though you can leave out part of the clause if it’s really obvious what is left out, e.g. “One if by land, two if by sea.” That leaves out the understood subject and verb “the British are coming”.
So it’s unsatifactory as it stands, even if comprehensible: it sounds like the person speaking the sentence is not a native speaker of English. However, it’s easily fixed: “If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.”
I suspect that part of the problem is that English makes a lot of use of the word “you”, while other languages use the equivalent word(s) a lot less, or in some cases don’t really have an equivalent to “you”.
“Please feel free to ask” is good grammar since the subject (you) and an auxillary verb (may) have been omitted. This is an elliptical sentence for “Please, you may feel free to ask.” However, when we use please we omit you. This is similar to a command, such “Shut up!”
So, I guess technically the sentence is correct but it sounds awkward, and it can be amended to read much better with very little effort.
This sounds just about right to me: “If you are having any questions” is the real problem in this sentence.
Daniel
I think this is the crux of the problem. Verbs of possession normally take the present simple, thus the question would normally be stated as “If you have any questions” rather than the stilted “If you are having any questions.” However, the latter is a grammatically permissible construct (so far as I know) and carries a slightly different meaning than the former. Take the examples: “I have questions about you” vs “I’m having questions about you.” The former explains a general state, one of the functions of present simple verbs. The latter indicates something that is progressing or continuing in time (hence the name present continuous/progressive tense.) It’s hard to explain for me, but the second statement carries more of a change-of-state meaning, more of a suspicious tone. It’s not a general state, but something that is happening now, changing in time.
Maybe someone can better explain.
This sort of phrasing reminds me of signs I saw while traveling in India.
I once heard a story about a tourist in Calcutta who was entering a shop just as it was about to close. He was curtly dismissed by the owner who told him, “Whatever you are wanting, we are not having!”
I don’t think it’s because it implies that the full sentence is “you may feel free to ask,” it would just be “you feel free to ask.” It’s a command. “Feel free to ask” is the same as “Don’t eat the shrimp.” The subject of the sentence is implied to be “you.” The verb “may” isn’t involved AFAIK.
Generally this is so, but in the OP sentence, “may” is also implied. “Don’t eat the shrimp,” is a command, but “Feel free to ask,” is really not a command, IMHO.
It’s not a command in the sense of telling someone to do something, but in the sense of how the sentence functions, if you know what I mean.
I also suspect that the OP is Indian. I work with several Indians and hear this type of construction all the time. I am not sure whether it is a grammar problem or a usage problem. Often, phrases that sound awkward to native ears are simply unidiomatic. Another “Indianism” is “today morning”. How does one explain why “yesterday morning” and “tomorrow morning” are acceptable while “today morning” is not? It’s just something native speakers of English don’t say; they say “this morning” instead.
“Have” meaning “to possess” is not used, in Standard English at least, in the present progressive {continuous} form: simple present is used instead. The same applies to the conditional usage in the OP.
“I am having a headache” is wrong; “I have a headache” is correct.
Just to confuse matters, other meanings of “have” are perfectly acceptable when used in the progressive form, for instance as a synonym for “experience”: “I’m having a bad day” is fine, whereas the simple form, “I have a bad day” is not.
I dislike the whole idea of reducing imperatives and similar constructions to ellipses – the imperative mode has been around Indo-European language at least back to Hittite times, and presumably was present in PIE, since it is in virtually all its descendents. The logical subject of the verb is an implied you, to be sure, but it’s not an omitted grammatical subject – imperative-mode verbs are direct-address forms that do not take subjects, a noun in direct address that is grammatically not a subject being supplied when identification is necessary: “Harry, use your wand!” (Apropos this situation, there is also a first-person-plural imperative in some languages, though not in English, rendering “Let us go, then, you and I” as a simple imperative verb.)
I think “If having fish, choose a dry white wine” is not only a perfectly acceptable sentence but also one in which there is no elision of subject and verb – granted it can be expanded to a “you are/you should” or a “one is/one should” construction. It’s precisely what I was referencing back in Post #2 when I mentioned that “if” will occasionally introduce a gerund phrase instead of a clause. And there’s a slight difference in inferential meaning between the imperative and the “should” constructions: the first is an advice directive, the second more of an etiquette-book social corrective. I’d hear the first directed at a newby-at-buying-wine by a knowledgeable wine-store employee, by way of being helpful in response to a question; the second sounds a trifle supercilious to me.
This kind of construction is the result of direct translation from Indian languages, some of which tend to use their equivalent of the progressive more often than it’s used in English.
Fresh back from dictionary.com, and found out that “if” is a conjunction. A subordinating conjunction, I’m pretty sure, but they didn’t say.
So how does that work? Don’t subordinating conjunctions usually take clauses?
Hmm. “What’s for dinner? If pizza, I’m not eating.” I guess that works. Is “if pizza” an adverbial phrase modifying “am eating”?
As for “having” not working for “possessing” in English, I don’t think that’s true. I’m having trouble coming up with examples, but–oh, wait.
Daniel
Absolutely. Other than its self-referencing nominal value in your “‘if’ is a conjunction” which all words exhibit (“It all depends on what you mean by ‘is’” :D), I’ve never seen it used other than as a subordinating conjunction.
Yes, they do, as I said in my original repsponse. But “usually” is not “always” – and well-formed English sentences can be produced where “if” introduces something other than a subordinate clause. Like the fish-and-wine example.
No, I’d deem it a subordinate conditional phrase modifying the entire main clause. Think of the “if…else” constructions in older programming languages for examples of how “if” is adaptable to phrasal construction in English. “You have three choices of action: (a) [long-winded explanation of one choice], (b) [another long-winded explanation], or © [yet another one]. If (a), then…”
“Have,” including the participial and gerund forms, functions both as the verb for “possess” and the auxiliary perfective verb. I think the suggestion was that “having” as auxiliary does not function well in this sort of construction – because English tends not to construct perfective – and particulary progressive perfective – active participles and gerunds when the “normal” imperfective will function as well. (Of course it does use them: “The food having been eaten, we proceeded to the living room.” But it tends to avoid constructing them where recasting the sentence will permit a less complex form.)
D’oh! Sorry, shoulda reread the thread before my latest response.
Makes sense, I think. This is the same type of modification as is happening in the Safire-hated construction, “Hopefully, I’ll get this figured out soon,” right? So still an adverbial modifier?
What does “auxiliary perfective verb” mean? If it means what I think–an auxiliary verb (be, have, keep, etc.) used in the past perfect tense (“I have seen the enemy”)–then I don’t think it’s what post #15 was arguing. But I’m not sure how post #15 applies to the OP, any way; “If having questions” doesn’t use the “possess” definition of “have,” unless “Having a bad day” uses that definition.
Daniel