I remembered crying when I first lost a patient due to an infection
easily treatable, had we had the antibiotics and the money to buy
them. (source)There’s a subjunctive after adjective phrase and the former seems to be a condition for the latter. In this case, is the highlighted part an adjunct for adding the condition or what?
Answer
Exactly. Had we had… is in effect the condition (IF) clause of an implicit conditional (IF…THEN) construction. Verb forms with the -able suffix may be understood as modal participles:
- They express passive voice(=BE VERBen) and dynamic modality (=CAN).
- They are unspecified with respect to tense (past/non-past), aspect (simple/perfect/progressive), and epistemic modality (factual/hypothetical/irrealis), all of which they take from their context.
Treatable is thus the verb of the consequence (THEN) clause and may be paraphrased
infections could have been treated had we had the antibiotics …
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Listenever , Answer Author : StoneyB on hiatus
