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  • Grrr, people saying 'lay' when they mean 'lie' really grinds my gears. It shouldn't, but it does. Makes people sound like chickens, claiming to be laying somewhere. I blame Snow Patrol.

    Erm, this is grammatically correct, and the verb used is 'to lie'. The sentence is a second conditional, which calls for the use of the indicative past ('lay') in the subordinate ('if') clause and the conditional in the main clause.

    I agree with you that the conflation of 'lie' and 'lay', especially in American English, is regrettable, but this is not an example of it.

  • it just needs the simple past form ('lay') rather than the perfect ('have lain')

  • In that case, surely the second line should be 'Would you have lain with me' if the past tense is being used.

    Sorry, I should have been more precise. It's the past participle, not the past tense.

    There are many types of past conditional sentences in English. Here are a few more examples:

    https://www.englishpage.com/conditional/pastconditional.html

    However, here the tense isn't actually the past, but the present. The tense of the whole sentence is determined by the main clause/the tense of the main clause (strictly speaking, the indicative in the subordinate clause doesn't have a tense--it hasn't happened, isn't happening, and may not happen, but the indicative is required because 'if' already carries the conditional sense, so adding a conditional form would be nonsense), i.e. the clause that has a subject and predicate and can therefore stand on its own.

    'If I lay here' is incomplete and can't stand on its own (unless you wanted a thought to trail, for instance: 'If I lay here ...' (meaningful pause, wink, wink)) without a clause to complete it. 'Would you lie with me?' is a complete sentence in its own right and the subordinate clause depends on it.

    Fun and games. :)

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