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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]
It is made using appropriate forms of the expression to be going to. [1] It is an alternative to other ways of referring to the future in English, such as the future construction formed with will (or shall) – in some contexts the different constructions are interchangeable, while in others they carry somewhat different implications.
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 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.
There may be regional variations in grammar, orthography, and word-use, especially between different English-speaking countries. Such differences are not classified normatively as non-standard or "incorrect" once they have gained widespread acceptance in a particular country.
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."
An exception is the active indicative third person plural, where the suffix is -erint instead of the expected -erunt. E.g. amaverint, not **amaverunt. The passive future perfect is formed using the passive perfect participle and the future of esse. Note that the participle is inflected like a normal adjective, i.e. it agrees grammatically with ...
The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...