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Both shall and will may be contracted to -'ll, most commonly in affirmative statements where they follow a subject pronoun. Their negations, shall not and will not, also have contracted forms: shan't and won't (although shan't is rarely used in North America, and is becoming rarer elsewhere too). See English auxiliaries and contractions.
dynamic modality, [2] which may be distinguished from deontic modality in that, with dynamic modality, the conditioning factors are internal – the subject's own ability or willingness to act [3] The following sentences illustrate epistemic and deontic uses of the English modal verb must: epistemic: You must be starving.
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 ...
The King's English is a book on English usage and grammar. It was written by the brothers Henry Watson Fowler and Francis George Fowler and published in 1906; [1] it thus predates by twenty years Modern English Usage, which was written by Henry alone after Francis's death in 1918.
An auxiliary verb (abbreviated aux) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a participle, which respectively provide the main semantic content of the clause. [1]
[1]: 23 [2] The term the Government always takes a plural verb in British civil service convention, perhaps to emphasise the principle of cabinet collective responsibility. [3] Compare also the following lines of Elvis Costello 's song " Oliver's Army ": Oliver's Army is here to stay / Oliver's Army are on their way .
Clearly this is an exceptional case where shall is better. --Sluggoster 09:31, 5 November 2007 (UTC) 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.