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Thus shall may be used (particularly in the second and third persons) to imply a command, promise or threat made by the speaker (i.e., that the future event denoted represents the will of the speaker rather than that of the subject). For example: You shall regret it before long. (speaker's threat) You shall not pass! (speaker's command)
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:
One example: Chinese: 妈妈骑马马慢妈妈骂马; pinyin: māma qí mǎ, mǎ màn, māma mà mǎ; lit. 'Mother is riding a horse... the horse is slow... mother scolds the horse'. [37] Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den: poem of 92 characters, all with the sound shi (in four different tones) when read in Modern Standard Mandarin
For example: She will have fallen asleep by the time we get home. I shall have gone by then. Will you have finished when I get back? The auxiliary is commonly contracted to ' ll in speech and often in writing, and the first part of the perfect infinitive is commonly contracted to ' ve in speech: see English auxiliaries and contractions.
An example for a non-European language with a similar encoding of modality is Manam. Here, a verb is prefixed by a morpheme which encodes number and person of the subject. These prefixes come in two versions, realis and irrealis. Which one is chosen depends on whether the verb refers to an actual past or present event (realis), or merely to a ...
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 Kipling example is paralleled by Bunyan's "He who would valiant be." I also like Donne's "If you will be true, you shall be true to them who're false to you," where "will" expresses perverse determination and would be pronounced heavily (from "The Indifferent"). A good example of "shall" also. Seadowns 13:47, 10 April 2018 (UTC)