My dear “pious prescriptivist ” Engee ( on offense buddy, I really like you, not to say “love”…. :))
This is always the case when someone is able to distinguish something which is absurdly obvious but lacking in any possible prospective foresight in terms of its broader semantic-syntactic spectrum.
Again, we’re not talking someone’s manner of using grammar forms and being judged as bad or good in accordance with the violation of the fixed grammatical rules. Nor is it up to ESL/IELTS levels but somewhat syntactic study, for that matter.
So then, may I enlighten you,Sir ,as for what the possible development of ‘protasis’ followed by ‘would’ in conditional sentences might be in the future, apart from those exclusions you mentioned( needless to say, you’re not a stranger to this grammatical term which simply means “If-clause”)
But just for the recoerd, I didn’t say it is CORRECT, I said it’s POSSIBLE, that’s a marked difference. Of course it’s INCORRECT as far as our prescriptive grammar goes and rightly so, even a Cro-Magnon man backed up by witches around a cauldron would work out the same conclusion ALL BY THEMSELVES ( after laborious mathematical calculations of course :)
This is indeed what they call “ a non-standard subjunctive”. It doesn’t make sense to further labour the point but you might be interested in reading the following :
Quote,
“This appears to be a possible, if not probable, development, as there is an increase in the use of ‘WOULD’ in the protasis of conditional clause in American English, according to Hancock ( 1993:241)
“Innovations in idiom seem to attract less attention than new words… One that seems to belong to this century is the encroachment of “if he would have” on “if he had”. She illustrates her claim that this construction is also found in the speech of educated Americans by citations from newspaper articles, quoting a brain surgeon, two government officials, and a professor of English.
The following example is from the professor of English :
(509) “If I would have lampooned Huckleberry Finn or rewritten it completely, I would have been taking a stand ( Hartfort [CT] Times, 27 February 1970)
Hancock ( 1993:251) interprets the use of ‘would’ in her example as a “non-standard subjunctive”,which is used to indicate counterfactuality, thus making up for the los of the subjunctive.
As “would” has also encroached on the simple past in written Standard English (cf. Miller 1993:124), it seems possible that not only Scots but also Standard English may be changing from a language that marks only the apodosis of conditional sentences counterfactual or hypothetical to one that marks both apodosis and protasis.