Use of "Shall"

Question

Hi Seniors,May you please throw some light on use of "Shall" in sentences. at times I got confused. as far as my knowledge concern "Shall" is being used to show mandate or in future tense.Please explore..

Mister Micawber · Accepted Answer

'May you' is not good English, Saunee. You may use 'Might/Could/Would you'.

'Shall' is dying in English, except in formal regulations and documents ('The party of the first part shall...') and set phrases ('Let's go, shall we?'). Here are some cogent remarks assembled by Wikipedia:

The prescribed usage is largely ignored by American, Irish, and Scottish speakers of English^. The Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_University_Press, 2002, says of the rule for the use of shall and will: "it is unlikely that this rule has ever had any consistent basis of authority in actual usage, and many examples of [British] English in print disregard it". The rule has even less force in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_English, where shall has a much more restricted role, and the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negation contraction shan't does not occur. In America, "I will" and "we will" are the usual forms, and anyone using "shall" in all but a few situations runs the risk of being thought haughty or pretentious.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the various special cases made it necessary for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Watson_Fowler's The King's English to devote 20 pages to the rules for shall vs. will, with the comment "the idiomatic use, while it comes by nature to southern Englishmen ... is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly acquire it". According to the English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Talbut_Onions, the "correct" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom use of shall and will was an infallible test of the true English speaker, since American, Irish, and Scottish speakers have such difficulty using the words in the same manner as the English. There is an illustrative old joke about the Scotsman who drowned in a river because he had cried "I will die! Nobody shall help me!" Dwight D. Eisenhower was reputed to have fired an aide who could not understand a distinction between "shall" and "will".

According to the New Oxford Dictionary of English, In modern English the interchangeable use of shall and will is an acceptable part of standard British and US English.

Saunee · Answer

Thanks a lot!!

Use of "Shall"

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