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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:
The first English grammar, Bref Grammar for English by William Bullokar, published in 1586, does not use the term "auxiliary" but says: All other verbs are called verbs-neuters-un-perfect because they require the infinitive mood of another verb to express their signification of meaning perfectly: and be these, may, can, might or mought, could, would, should, must, ought, and sometimes, will ...
As the last example shows, the words making up these combinations do not always remain consecutive. For details of the formation of such constructions, see English clause syntax. The uses of the various types of combination are described in the detailed sections of the present article.
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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 ...
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