If you haven't already watched my first video, there's a link to it in the description below. Ungrammatical? [duplicate]

More and more often I read sentences such as the following:

  • If you're not familiar with Miami's “Golden Era”, this film captures it brilliantly.
  • If you're not aware of the basics, two teams of five players spawn on corners of a map.
  • If you're not familiar with it, Pinboard is a bookmarking service that lets you save URLs.
  • If you're not aware of how to transfer funds from your Main wallet to your Australian wallet, this explains how:
  • In case you're wondering, mBio wasn't fooled.
  • In case you don't know Marco, he was one of Masahiko Kimura's first apprentices.

Are they correct? Why? If they are not, then what is wrong, and how can they be best corrected?


P.S. By "correct" I mean do they follow Standard English and English Grammar?

P.P.S. Although they're harder to find, I found more examples in the New York Times! Publication in the NYT means these sentence structures are correct, right?

  • If you’re not familiar with this little tweak, it’s simple.
  • If you’re not familiar with your provider’s policy, New York’s Department of Financial Services publishes a helpful chart.
  • In case you're wondering, the rupiah is the national currency of Indonesia.

The only source of potential confusion that I see here is that "If you didn't know..." can be used in two distinct senses;

  • as a hypothetical, where this "if" portion of the statement is an assertion and the rest of the statement is meant only in the context where that assertion is assumed to be true

and

  • as a way to state the intention of the statement

These examples seem to be cases of the second. Here the "If" part of the sentence operates similarly to "Happily" as it is sometimes used at the beginning of an utterance. My intuition is that it is not a part of the parse structure of the sentence, but instead a piece of metalanguage regarding the nature and intent of the speech-act itself.

Other common examples which I take to be of the same nature (at least pragmatically speaking -- I expect that the syntax would vary substantially at the deepest level):

Obviously, if you see something printed frequently it is likely to be grammatical in some sense.

or something even stranger, like

To be certain, the syntactic structure here is not clear or obvious.

(Note that there are not many infinitives that could comfortably take the place of "to be certain" here, which indicates to me that something strange is happening at a level that is not naively syntactic)

I think the parse here has a structure like:

Utterance : {
              meta/prefix : { some-stuff-indicating-context-or-feeling }

              content : { A-normally-structured-sentence }
            }

In conclusion, it is important to bear in mind the flexibility of language and its users.


It seems to me the instruction is correct enough; it's a contraction of an if/then statement of sequential parts of one thought: if X then Y; followed by the understood, offered elaboration."If you are unfamiliar with X (then I will provide for you/direct you to an explanation/description and here it is): ..." It's a rhetorical device by which the writer/speaker offers casual intimacy and unoppressive authority.


These appear to be standard introductory clauses to me. I've second-guessed myself a few times in trying to find other things wrong with the examples, but nothing's coming to me. Perhaps, if you're not satisfied with this or other responses, you might consider trying to better explain what you think is wrong.

EDIT: I don't mean to make this seem as clear as it may appear to native speakers. I believe this to be a related construction to beginning a sentence with an adverb in an otherwise apparently ungrammatical manner. For more on that, see Grammar Girl's article on "Hopefully." It is an idiomatic construction that is common enough to be recognized by folks like the Chicago Manual of Style, which takes its cue in this case from Webster's Dictionary and the Oxford English Distionary. The reason you're seeing it more often is that the AP upgraded the construction in 2012.