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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.
Hawaiian Pidgin is a creole language most of whose vocabulary, but not grammar, is drawn from English. As is generally the case with creole languages, it is an isolating language and modality is typically indicated by the use of invariant pre-verbal auxiliaries. [ 5 ]
[In modern English the interchangeable use of shall and will is an acceptable part of standard British and US English.] [These modal verbs have been used in the past for a variety of meanings.] [Disorganized list of special cases]
In American English, to assure is purely to intend to give the listener confidence, to ensure is to make certain of something, and to insure is to purchase or provide insurance for something. The only difference with British English is that assure can be used instead of insure, particularly in the context of life insurance or assurance.
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.
But as the use of thou in non-dialect English began to decline in the 18th century, [22] its meaning nonetheless remained familiar from the widespread use of the latter translation. [23] The Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which first appeared in 1946, retained the pronoun thou exclusively to address God , using you in other places.
A aggravate – Some have argued that this word should not be used in the sense of "to annoy" or "to oppress", but only to mean "to make worse". According to AHDI, the use of "aggravate" as "annoy" occurs in English as far back as the 17th century. In Latin, from which the word was borrowed, both meanings were used. Sixty-eight percent of AHD4's usage panel approves of its use in "It's the ...