Условные предложения в языке: структура и грамматика.

Sentences expressing factual implications, or hypothetical situations and their consequences
the noncustodial punishment for a crime in Canada

Conditional sentences are natural language sentences that express that one thing is contingent on something else, e. g. "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the main clause of the sentence is conditional on the dependent clause. A full conditional thus contains two clauses: a dependent clause called the antecedent (or protasis or if clause), which expresses the condition, and a main clause called the consequent (or apodosis or then clause) expressing the result. Languages use a variety of grammatical forms and constructions in conditional sentences. The forms of verbs used in the antecedent and consequent are often subject to particular rules as regards their tense, aspect, and mood. Many languages have a specialized type of verb form called the conditional mood – broadly equivalent in meaning to the English "would (do something)" – for use in some types of conditional sentences.

There are various ways of classifying conditional sentences. Many of these categories are visible cross linguistically.

Languages have different rules concerning the grammatical structure of conditional sentences. These may concern the syntactic structure of the antecedent and consequent clauses, as well as the forms of verbs used in them (particularly their tense and mood). Rules for English and certain other languages are described below; more information can be found in the articles on the grammars of individual languages. (Some languages are also described in the article on the conditional mood.)

In French, the conjunction corresponding to "if" is si. The use of tenses is quite similar to English:
In implicative conditional sentences, the present tense (or other appropriate tense, mood, etc.) is used in both clauses. In predictive conditional sentences, the future tense or imperative generally appears in the main clause, but the condition clause is formed with the present tense (as in English). This contrasts with dependent clauses introduced by certain other conjunctions, such as quand ("when"), where French uses the future (while English has the present). In counterfactual conditional sentences, the imperfect is used to express the condition (where English similarly uses the past tense). The main clause contains the conditional mood (e. g. j'arriverais, "I would arrive"). In counterfactual conditional sentences with a past time frame, the condition is expressed using the pluperfect e. g. (s'il avait attendu, "if he had waited"), and the consequence with the conditional perfect (e. g. je l'aurais vu, "I would have seen him"). Again these verb forms parallel those used in English. As in English, certain mixtures and variations of these patterns are possible. See also French verbs.

In Slavic languages, such as Russian, clauses in conditional sentences generally appear in their natural tense (future tense for future reference, etc.) However, for counterfactuals, a conditional/subjunctive marker such as the Russian бы by generally appears in both condition and consequent clauses, and this normally accompanies the past tense form of the verb. See Russian grammar, Bulgarian grammar, etc. for more detail.

While the material conditional operator used in classical logic is sometimes read aloud in the form of a conditional sentence, the intuitive interpretation of conditional statements in natural language does not always correspond to it. Thus, philosophical logicians and formal semanticists have developed a wide variety of conditional logics that better match actual conditional language and conditional reasoning. They include the strict conditional and the variably strict conditional.