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Generally, however, will is far more common than shall. Use of shall is normally a marked usage, typically indicating formality or seriousness and (if not used with a first person subject) expressing a colored meaning as described below. In most dialects of English, the use of shall as a future marker is viewed as archaic. [9]
The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
The will/shall future consists of the modal verb will or shall together with the bare infinitive of the main verb, as in "He will win" or "I shall win". ( Prescriptive grammarians prefer will in the second and third persons and shall in the first person, reversing the forms to express obligation or determination, but in practice shall and will ...
As for shall vs should, my (northwestern US) ears prefer shall but the difference is very slight. Shall focuses on your magnimony, and you may already be half-standing when you say it. Should focuses on your social obligation, and you may have no intention of opening the window unless the other person says "yes".
The longer "month" may be set as the first (5–4–4), second (4–5–4), or third (4–4–5) unit. Its major advantage over a regular calendar is that each period is the same length and ends on the same day of the week, which is useful for planning manufacturing or work shifts.
This quarter system was adopted by the oldest universities in the English-speaking world (Oxford, founded circa 1096, [1] and Cambridge, founded circa 1209 [2]). Over time, Cambridge dropped Trinity Term and renamed Hilary Term to Lent Term, and Oxford also dropped the original Trinity Term and renamed Easter Term as Trinity Term, thus establishing the three-term academic "quarter" year widely ...
Its use often conveys lighthearted informality in which many speakers intentionally use a dialect or colloquial construction they would probably not use in formal written English. The colloquial usage is widely understood by British speakers. Similarly, stood may be used instead of standing. To Americans and still to many Britons, those usages ...
An exception is the active indicative third person plural, where the suffix is -erint instead of the expected -erunt. E.g. amaverint, not **amaverunt. The passive future perfect is formed using the passive perfect participle and the future of esse. Note that the participle is inflected like a normal adjective, i.e. it agrees grammatically with ...