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Thus shall is used with the meaning of obligation, and will with the meaning of desire or intention. An illustration of the supposed contrast between shall and will (when the prescriptive rule is adhered to) appeared in the 19th century, [11] and has been repeated in the 20th century [12] and in the 21st: [13] I shall drown; no one will save me!
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.
For example, the inferred certainty sense of English must developed after the strong obligation sense; the probabilistic sense of should developed after the weak obligation sense; and the possibility senses of may and can developed later than the permission or ability sense. Two typical sequences of evolution of modal meanings are:
This is a comparison of English dictionaries, which are dictionaries about the language of English.The dictionaries listed here are categorized into "full-size" dictionaries (which extensively cover the language, and are targeted to native speakers), "collegiate" (which are smaller, and often contain other biographical or geographical information useful to college students), and "learner's ...
As for shall vs should, my (northwestern US) ears prefer shall but the difference is very slight. Shall focuses on your magnimony, and you may already be half-standing when you say it. Should focuses on your social obligation, and you may have no intention of opening the window unless the other person says "yes".
An example of a future tense form is the French achètera, meaning "will buy", derived from the verb acheter ("to buy"). The "future" expressed by the future tense usually means the future relative to the moment of speaking, although in contexts where relative tense is used it may mean the future relative to some other point in time under ...
The plain meaning rule, also known as the literal rule, is one of three rules of statutory construction traditionally applied by English courts. [1] The other two are the "mischief rule" and the "golden rule". The plain meaning rule dictates that statutes are to be interpreted using the ordinary meaning of the language of the statute.
Literal translation, direct translation, or word-for-word translation is the translation of a text done by translating each word separately without analysing how the words are used together in a phrase or sentence. [1] In translation theory, another term for literal translation is metaphrase (as opposed to paraphrase for an analogous translation).