Shall and Will

ERTAINLY ONE of the liveliest issues in the long and varied history of English grammatical study is the question of rules governing the use of the verbal auxiliaries shall and will. From the beginnings of English grammars in the seventeenth century to the present, when many would consider the issue quite dead, shall and will have generated heated, if not always enlightened, discussions in a wide range of forms: in school and scholarly grammars, in dictionaries, in lists of Scotticisms, in studies of Anglo-Irish, Scottish, and American usage, in comparative grammars, in histories of the language, in popular magazines, and in scholarly journals and monographs. In spite of all these treatments of shall/will, at least one issue has received short shrift: the hypothesis that shall/will rules were inductive generalizations based on what was judged to be actual, albeit dialectally varied, usage. Evidence for that hypothesis is considered here, and especially for the importance of dialect in the formulation of these rules very early in the grammatical tradition. Part of the reason why shall/will rules have been such a lively issue is the fact that the development of the future tense is itself an extremely complex problem in the history of English. As verbs with independent modal meanings came to be auxiliaries used as one means of expressing futurity, inevitable overlapping occurred between the expression of future time and the expression of the attitude of the speaker toward the event; thus the very heart of the problem is the intimate relationship between syntax and semantics

Dialectology · Linguistics · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · History · Philosophy

• I will be drowned and no man shall save me’

  Iingrid Tieken‐Boon van Ostade•English Studies•1985

  Add to list