I’d love if someone could give me a really throughly explanation of the dichotomy between "shall" and "will" how they were used and which places they’ve been respectively relegated to.
‘Shall’ started life in Old English as sculan, meaning ‘to be obliged to’. From the present tense ic sceal we get ‘I shall’, and from the past tense sceolde we get ‘should’. In Old English it sometimes had the sense of future time, but primarily denoted an obligation or necessity.
In the same way, we can trace ‘will’ back to the Old English willan, meaning ‘to wish, will’. From the present tense ic wille we get ‘I will’, and from the past tense wolde we get ‘would’. In all Old English texts this verb has only a secondary sense of future time.
Because English has never had a real future tense, the verbs ‘will’ and ‘shall’ began to be used more and more to indicate future time. However, they never really lost their original modality.
Under prescriptive grammar, it became the rule that ‘shall’ was used as the correct future auxilliary for the first person (singular and plural - ‘I/we shall’), and ‘will’ was correct for other persons. The idea behind this is one of gentility. I and we acted out of perceived obligation, whereas you and they were welcome to follow their desires. This rule has been widely written about, but is almost certainly artificial. It became usual to reverse the roles of ‘shall’ and ‘will’ for emphasis, particularly when expressing a wish or intention. However, I find it more appropriate to use ‘shall’ when obligation or necessity is implied, and ‘will’ when a desire or wish is expressed.
In speech, and a lot of writing, both verbs contract to ‘ll, and thus any distinction is lost. The verb ‘shall’ is used only for emphasis in most dialects. However, in England and Wales, ‘shall’ is still used relatively frequently and without emphasis. It occurs most clearly in speech in its negative form shan’t.
"I shan’t go there for lunch again." (idiomatic in England and Wales)
Unless you wish to follow a certain rule to distinguish these verbs it’s better to use ‘will’. Otherwise readers/listeners might infer an added layer of meaning that you didn’t intend.
Under prescriptive grammar, it became the rule that ‘shall’ was used as the correct future auxilliary for the first person (singular and plural - ‘I/we shall’), and ‘will’ was correct for other persons. The idea behind this is one of gentility. I and we acted out of perceived obligation, whereas you and they were welcome to follow their desires.
Except for Law and Religion (and the pretentious), I don’t hear "shall" at all. It is always "will" without any sense of obligation. Obligation is left to "should," but if someone says, "I should!" it doesn’t not mean "I will!" In fact, "should" most likely means "won’t."
KT:
For ordinary (non-academic types trying to impress, and usually All Americans) folks will will do.
Americans normally use will to express most of the senses reserved for shall in English usage. Americans use shall chiefly in first person invitations and questions that request an opinion or agreement, such as Shall we go? and in certain fixed expressions, such as We shall overcome. In formal style, Americans use shall to express an explicit obligation, as in Applicants shall provide a proof of residence, though this sense is also expressed by must or should. In speech the distinction that the English signal by the choice of shall or will may be rendered by stressing the auxiliary, as in I will leave tomorrow ("I intend to leave"); by choosing another auxiliary, such as must or have to; or by using an adverb such as certainly.
In addition to its sense of obligation, shall also can convey high moral seriousness that derives in part from its extensive use in the King James Bible, as in "Righteousness shall go before him and shall set us in the way of his steps" (Ps 85:13) and "He that shall humble himself shall be exalted" (Mt 23:12). The prophetic overtones that shall bears with it have no doubt led to its use in some of the loftiest rhetoric in English. This may be why Lincoln chose to use it instead of will in the Gettysburg Address: "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
Under prescriptive grammar, it became the rule that ‘shall’ was used as the correct future auxilliary for the first person (singular and plural - ‘I/we shall’), and ‘will’ was correct for other persons.
Yeah! Exactly… That was the rule a teacher of mine tried to drench in our little heads when we started learning English at school. ¬¬ The fool… We couldn’t even make a clear ditinction between Spanish verbal moods and she wanted us to learn some stupid nonsense in English that, by the way, would have sounded loopsided in the mouth of a child.
Now, I see I had built up acceptable explanations myself -I had inferred that "shall" was kind of solemn and the relation with "sollen" and "wollen" was clear. However the blurry memories of the said rule made me uneasy of the correctness of my speech.
Notwithstanding, thanks to you I’m much more confident on how to use "shall".
Thanks for starting this thread. The answer were good, or perhaps I shall say, great. But the best of all is your wonderful subject line.
Shall we use will or will you be using shall?
It has the same circular logic as my new way of answering the quesiton, "how are you?". I reply, "I’ve been better. But I am so much better than I have been."
According to "The Longman Grammar of Spoken & Written English," the modal "will" is "extremely common" while "shall" is "relatively rare."
In their corpus, "will" is the most common of the modal verbs, occurring with a frequency of over 3500 times per million words. On the other hand, "shall" is the least common of the modals, having a frequency of about 200 or 250 per million words. For every time you come across "shall" in your reading, you’ll see "will" at least 15 times.
The corpus used for the analysis of English in the "Longman Grammar of Written and Spoken English"
contains a little over 40,000,000 words. It includes samples drawn from conversations, fiction, news and academic prose. British and American English predominate, but some other dialects are represented as well, particularly in the fiction component.
The corpus represents contemporary English: most of the texts were produced after 1980. The exception is in the fiction component where a few classic texts from the first half of the 20th century are included.
So in conclusion, although a modern translation of the Bible might be included, the King James version is not.
Yup, skewing the majority of language to the last twenty years, with an upper limit of a century, might make that corpus nicely contemporary, but it’s a bit like cut flowers - rootless and short lived. Contemporary English, viewed alone, can often be influenced by Victorian prescriptivism and postmodern ephemera. If rules drawn from such a corpus are applied to the majority of Modern English texts, then it instantly finds Shakespeare and the Authorised Version guilty of every single grammatical mistake. The odd truth is that Early Modern English is far less hung up on trying to jump through the circus of grammatical hoops.
[quote author=Garzo link=board=grammar;num=1087749219;start=0#11 date=06/25/04 at 16:43:49]The odd truth is that Early Modern English is far less hung up on trying to jump through the circus of grammatical hoops.
- Garzo.
I don’t really find that odd, since I don’t think there were many people in that particular period who obsessed over English Grammar enough to set down rules. IIRC, Johnson was one of the first to really start beating that horse.
Regardless of the Imperial Imprimatur of the Roman Church (IIRC), the writers of Early Modern English were just as obsessive about grammar as we can be. William Caxton was quite aware that he was at the forefront of a revolution in the English language, and was suitably worried about spelling and grammar (famously he worried about whether hens laid egges or eyren). William Tyndale was deeply concerned that his pioneering translation of the Bible into English should be ‘readable to the ploughman’. Edmund Spenser was submerged up to his neck in, often intolerable, revived Chaucerisms. Thomas Wilson’s 16th-century work The Arte of Rhetorique fiercely attacks the deluge of Latinate, or inkhorn, words entering the English language. John Dryden complained that we were mixing English with too much French, John Addison complained that so many contractions "untuned our Language, and clogged it with Consonants", Daniel Defoe was appalled by the number of swearwords ("Frenzy of the Tongue, a Vomit of the Brain"), and Jonathan Swift (1712) declared that the English language was in desperate need of an academy. Dr Johnson’s dictionary was influenced by all the intense debate that had occurred from Caxton onwards. In this way, it stands with one board planted in Early Modern and the other in Later Modern English.
[quote author=Garzo link=board=grammar;num=1087749219;start=0#13 date=06/29/04 at 07:34:49]Regardless of the Imperial Imprimatur of the Roman Church (IIRC), the writers of Early Modern English were just as obsessive about grammar as we can be. William Caxton was quite aware that he was at the forefront of a revolution in the English language, and was suitably worried about spelling and grammar (famously he worried about whether hens laid egges or eyren). William Tyndale was deeply concerned that his pioneering translation of the Bible into English should be ‘readable to the ploughman’. Edmund Spenser was submerged up to his neck in, often intolerable, revived Chaucerisms. Thomas Wilson’s 16th-century work The Arte of Rhetorique fiercely attacks the deluge of Latinate, or inkhorn, words entering the English language. John Dryden complained that we were mixing English with too much French, John Addison complained that so many contractions "untuned our Language, and clogged it with Consonants", Daniel Defoe was appalled by the number of swearwords ("Frenzy of the Tongue, a Vomit of the Brain"), and Jonathan Swift (1712) declared that the English language was in desperate need of an academy. Dr Johnson’s dictionary was influenced by all the intense debate that had occurred from Caxton onwards. In this way, it stands with one board planted in Early Modern and the other in Later Modern English.
A teacher of mine tried to explain using these two sentences
"I shall drown , no one will save me"
"I will drown , no one shall save me"
The first sentence conveys the speakers fear of drowning as no one is able to save him. The second conveys his determination to commit suicide by drowning and not allowing anyone to save him.
