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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 preterite forms given above (could, might, should, and would, corresponding to can, may, shall, and will, respectively) do not always simply modify the meaning of the modal to give it past reference. The only one regularly used as an ordinary past tense is could when referring to ability: I could swim may serve as a past form of I can swim.
With exceptions such as usage in The New York Times, the names of sports teams are usually treated as plurals even if the form of the name is singular. [5] The difference occurs for all nouns of multitude, both general terms such as team and company and proper nouns (for example where a place name is used to refer to a sports team). For instance,
Modal verbs in Italian form a distinct class (verbi modali or verbi servili). [7] They can be easily recognized by the fact that they are the only group of verbs that does not have a fixed auxiliary verb for forming the perfect , but they can inherit it from the verb they accompany – Italian can have two different auxiliary verbs for forming ...
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". --Sluggoster 09:28, 5 November ...
An English irregular verb’s simple past tense form is typically distinct from its past participle (with which the auxiliary to have constructs the past perfect), as in went vs. have gone (of to go), despite them being the same for regular verbs, as in demanded vs. have demanded (of to demand).
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The set of propositions which forms the basis of evaluation is called the modal base. The result of the evaluation is called the modal force . [ 2 ] : 649 For example, the utterance in (4) expresses that, according to what the speaker has observed, it is necessary to conclude that John has a rather high income: