“Harry Potter, do you know what unicorn blood is used for?”
“No,” said Harry, startled by the odd question. “We’ve only used the horn and tail hair in Potions.”
“That is because it is a monstrous thing, to slay a unicorn,” said Firenze. “Only one who has nothing to lose, and everything to gain, would commit such a crime. The blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even if you are an inch from death, but at a terrible price. You have slain something pure and defenseless to save yourself, and you will have but a half-life, a cursed life, from the moment the blood touches your lips.”
(Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone)
It seems like, I wonder, there needs to be a conditional clause instead of the perfect declarative sentence. Can the declarative denote a conditional implication?
Answer
This sentence and the preceding one are understood as consequences of the “condition” described in the beginning of Firenze’s speech, “to slay a unicorn” and “commit such a crime”.
In an extended discourse it would be tedious for both reader and writer to keep repeating the underlying context with each succeeding sentence, as if each sentence had to bear its entire sense within itself so it would be suitable for citation in a textbook. Instead, what is uttered earlier provides the context for interpreting what follows, until it is expressly negated.
This is acceptable even in very formal registers, although there the governing “condition” will usually be introduced more explicitly than it is here, perhaps with something like “Let us assume that” or “We come now to the case of”.
ADDED:
It should also be kept in mind that the “sentence”, although it is the fundamental unit of syntactical inquiry, is really a very loose concept. In practise, it means whatever lies between two full stops; but as you must have been aware when you were reading Brontë and Steinbeck, literary practice varies widely in that respect: modern authors prefer much shorter periods. Firenze’s speech has long periods, by JKR’s standards, but Brontë would probably have put the entire paragraph into single sentence:
“That is because it is a monstrous thing to slay a unicorn,” said Firenze; “only one who has nothing to lose, and everything to gain, would commit such a crime; the blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even if you are an inch from death, but at a terrible price: you have slain something pure and defenseless to save yourself, and you will have but a half-life, a cursed life, from the moment the blood touches your lips.”
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Listenever , Answer Author : StoneyB on hiatus
