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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]
An ambiguous case is You must speak Spanish. The primary meaning would be the deontic meaning ("You are required to speak Spanish.") but this may be intended epistemically ("It is surely the case that you speak Spanish"). Epistemic modals can be analyzed as raising verbs, while deontic modals can be analyzed as control verbs.
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."
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.
Use of modal verbs with future meaning, to combine the expression of future time with certain modality: "I must do this" (also mun in Northern English dialect); "We should help him"; "I can get out of here"; "We may win"; "You might succeed". The same modal verbs are also often used with present rather than future reference.
shall, will, should and would. See Shall and will. since and sense. Since is used as an adverb or a preposition to imply the same meaning as "after then" or "from" in a sentence. Sense is a noun meaning any method to gather data about an environment. Standard: I have known her since last year. Standard: My sense of smell is weak.
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The Diccionario de la lengua española [a] (DLE; [b] English: Dictionary of the Spanish language) is the authoritative dictionary of the Spanish language. [1] It is produced, edited, and published by the Royal Spanish Academy, with the participation of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language.