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Is the following conditional that combines falls + sollten with a modal verb, possible?

Falls Sie keinen Brief von meinem Anwalt erhalten wollen sollten, ...

It sounds wrong and I'm not sure that putting sollten as the first verb in the sentence would help, though it does sound slightly better.

Are similar constructions (with modal verbs in them) present, and if so, how often would they occur?

K.T.
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  • Sollten is not an infinitive and can be be dropped without change of meaning. – guidot Aug 16 '23 at 07:51
  • @guidot thank you, I have changed the title to reflect this. Does the sentence not strike you as weird-sounding? – K.T. Aug 16 '23 at 07:53
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    Yes it sounds clumsy, but not really wrong. Dropping falls and moving sollten to its place seems perfectly acceptable, however. – guidot Aug 16 '23 at 07:57
  • Related question. – guidot Aug 16 '23 at 08:00
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    You can make it even more weird by adding even more modal verbs, if you want. It will still be corrrect grammar. If you're asking about style, however, you've already overdone it ;) – tofro Aug 16 '23 at 12:30

1 Answers1

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The sentence is quite bad from the perspective of euphony, but quite correct from a grammatical perspective.

Grammar is fundamentally reductive: whatever emerges from the repeated application of a finite number of constructions is considered "right", even if that result is unforeseen. Euphony works in a holistic way: it considers the totality of the result as it is, and if the result contains too many repeated elements it is judged to be infelicitous, particularly if the repeated surface forms are in fact different underlying mechanisms (such as "-en" being used both as an infinitive suffix and as an inflection suffix).

Kilian Foth
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  • Thank you for the answer - and thanks to all the contributors in the comments as well. I even learned two new words from your explanation ;) – K.T. Aug 16 '23 at 15:09
  • I think the combination of both falls and sollten is also questionable. It's a doubling as either of both says there are alternatives. – Janka Aug 16 '23 at 18:37