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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]
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.
shall not (archaic) shan’ shall not shan’t: shall not she’d: she had / she would she’ll: she shall / she will she’s: she has / she is she'd'nt've (informal) she did not have / she would not have should’ve: should have shouldn’t: should not shouldn’t’ve (informal) should not have somebody’s: somebody has / somebody is someone’s
As is generally the case with creole languages, it is an isolating language and modality is typically indicated by the use of invariant pre-verbal auxiliaries. [5] The invariance of the modal auxiliaries to person, number, and tense makes them analogous to modal auxiliaries in English.
The English conditional is expressed periphrastically with verb forms governed by the auxiliary verb would (or sometimes should with a first-person singular subject; see shall and will). The modal verb could is also sometimes used as a conditional (of can ).
The King's English is less like a dictionary than Modern English Usage: it consists of longer articles on more general topics, such as vocabulary, syntax, and punctuation and draws heavily on examples from many sources throughout. One of its sections is a systematic description of the appropriate uses of shall and will.
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 ...
Examples are the English and French conditionals (an analytic construction in English, [a] but inflected verb forms in French), which are morphologically futures-in-the-past, [1] and of which each has thus been referred to as a "so-called conditional" [1] [2] (French: soi-disant conditionnel [3] [4] [5]) in modern and contemporary linguistics ...