ORIGINAL SENTENCE: “If that gargantuan predator made it into the city before us, it is sure to have wrecked everything in sight.”
By the verb tense “****made ****it” in the if-clause, I wonder if the speaker is referring to an Unlikely Future situation or a Likely Past situation?
Or can it go either way, depending on what tense follows in the second half of the sentence?
If the speaker has an Unlikely Future situation in mind, I think she is going to use the tense “would” and say…
Unlikely Future situation: “If that gargantuan predator {made it / were to make it / should make it (BrE)} into the city before us, it {would wreck} everything in sight.”
2) Considering the original sentence does not use the tense “would”, I wonder if the speaker is referring to a Likely Past situation instead?
If so, is the tense “made it” close to “has made it” or “has already made it” in the speaker’s mind?
Likely Past situation: “If that gargantuan predator {made it / has made it / has already made it} into the city before us, it {is sure to have wrecked / must have wrecked} everything in sight.”
I disagree. By adding “had”, you have changed the precedent to a counterfactual, and the consequent would then be “…it would have wrecked everything in sight.”
I don’t think so. There’s no requirement for tenses to “match” in order to be unambiguous, if by “match” you mean “be the same.” We’d never be able to express ourselves completely if we only combined clauses with the same tense. However, if you mean that the mood doesn’t match–if it were different from one clause to the other–then it would indeed be unclear, and prescriptively ungrammatical.
And hiberncus is correct: Using the past perfect aspect (had made), would make the conditional clause counterfactual, and change the meaning completely.
I don’t understand how this could be interpreted as talking about something happening in the future. It seems unambiguously talking about an event set in the past - the ambiguity is around whether it actually happened or not.
If a present conditional is counterfactual (contrary-to-fact, unlikely, hypothetical, etc.–there are various ways of referring to it) then you might say it has a future perspective, because one is saying that it’s something that hasn’t happened, (and probably won’t happen), but the fact that you are speculating about it at all implies by default some kind of vision of a future potential–of what could happen should circumstances change:
If you gave me a thousand bucks right now, I’d go to Vegas this very evening.
But that’s not the case here, as you note–it’s clearly about the past. The OP is confusing the present counterfactual with the past factual. Because made is the past of make (similarly to how gave is the past of give, in the example above), he or she is wondering if it could be a present hypothetical conditional (like the example above).
The very fact that the “made it” part per se could be taken as meaning either Unlikely Future or Likely Past threw me off.
When the speaker has Likely Past in mind, am I correct in assuming that the tense in the main clause can be “will have wrecked”?
Likely Past (Version A): “If that gargantuan predator made it into the city before us, it will have wrecked everything in sight.”
Likely Past (Version B): “If that gargantuan predator has made it into the city before us, it will have wrecked everything in sight.”
