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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.
Prototypical conditional sentences in English are those of the form "If X, then Y". The clause X is referred to as the antecedent (or protasis), while the clause Y is called the consequent (or apodosis). A conditional is understood as expressing its consequent under the temporary hypothetical assumption of its antecedent.
If separating words using spaces is also permitted, the total number of known possible meanings rises to 58. [38] Czech has the syllabic consonants [r] and [l], which can stand in for vowels. A well-known example of a sentence that does not contain a vowel is Strč prst skrz krk, meaning "stick your finger through the neck."
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 ...
What is called the English conditional mood (or just the conditional) is formed periphrastically using the modal verb would in combination with the bare infinitive of the following verb. (Occasionally should is used in place of would with a first person subject – see shall and will.
The following sentences illustrate epistemic and deontic uses of the English modal verb must: epistemic: You must be starving. ("I think it is almost a certainty that you are starving.") deontic: You must leave now. ("You are required to leave now.") An ambiguous case is You must speak Spanish.
For more details, see English conditional sentences § Use of will and would in condition clauses. For the use of would after the verb wish and the expression if only, see § Expressions of wish. The auxiliary verbs could and might can also be used to indicate the conditional mood, as in the following: If the opportunity were here, I could do ...