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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 ...
The King's English is less like a dictionary than Modern English Usage: it consists of longer articles on more general topics, such as vocabulary, syntax, and punctuation and draws heavily on examples from many sources throughout. One of its sections is a systematic description of the appropriate uses of shall and will.
English: pdf version of englisch wikibook on basic writing This file was created with MediaWiki to LaTeX . The LaTeX source code is attached to the PDF file (see imprint).
The use of "an" before words beginning with an unstressed "h" is less common generally in AmE. [35] Such usage would now be seen as affected or incorrect in AmE, [36] which normally uses a in all these cases. According to The New Oxford Dictionary of English, such use is also increasingly rare the UK. [34]
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The question concerns "formality." By that I mean not wanting to sound too formal, or snooty, or condescending, in spoken language or in a piece of writing that is written in conversational English. One of the topic headings in this article could have said something like "The use of will or shall in conversational English."