I shall

USAGE

and I will

f:jl'f!} '-';...-r ffIf'l ..•'t~':IlAY.~lt.1M~ .tSp CM,tli, '""",,,l<1.r:N her torment, ---ISHALL HAVE

TO LIVEWITH IT

Of course, she must have said 'shall'.Every other paper reported thesentence with 'shall', and that is howit was spoken on radio and televisionnews that day. So why did The Sunprint 'will'? Was it simply that shallwouldn't fit very neatly into theheadline measure?

And what is all this about anyway?More space seems to have been

devoted to the question of shall andwill than to any other issue of Englishusage. The debate has gone on sincethe early part of the 17th century, andin recent decades has continued toattract the attention of grammarians,usage commentators, and lexicog­raphers. The great Danish gramma­rian, Otto Jespersen, devotes over100 pages to it in his 7-volumegrammar; the Fowlers give it morethan 20 pages; and the OED devotesover 15 pages to the complex historyof these two verbs. The problem hasbeen around for some time. It will notgo away.

Nor shall it, for the rest of thiscolumn.

The trouble began with the 17th­century grammars, which tried toformulate a simple rule to cover theuse of the two verbs. In its traditionalform, the rule draws a sharpdistinction between shall and will.

The two verbs are said to have clearlydistinct meanings and clearly dif-

42 ENGLISH TODAY No. 5 - JANUARY 1986

DAVID CRYSTAL

ferentiated patterns of usage.The first meaning is to talk about

future time, pure and simple. Forthis, we are told to use shall with thefirst person:

I shall be going out for a while.

and will for the second and thirdpersons:

You will get a reply in a week or so.The manager will be with you in aminute.

The same principle is said to applywhen asking questions:

Shall I sit over here?

Will you/they be travelling by train?

and with negative sentences:

I shan't be staying for long.You/she won't like it.

The other main use of these verbs isto express 'volitional' meanings ­meanings where the intention to act isparamount, such as willingness,insistence, commanding, promising,and threatening. Here, the traditionalusage pattern is reversed. (If you'reEnglish, you'll be able to 'feel' thesemeanings best if you say theseexamples with a strong stress on thewill or shall. If you're American,

Scottish, or Irish, don't bother: seebelow.)

I will see him after dinner, and notbefore.You shall go to the ball.Mary shall have a new dress.

And similarly for questions andnegative sentences:

Will we let him join our group? I doubtit.Shall John's friends be allowed tocome?

Rules of this kind have appeared ingrammar books for over 300 years.And people who do not speak or writeaccording to these rules have beencondemned in no uncertain terms. 'Areprehensible popular inaccuracy,'wrote the American philologist Wil­liam Dwight Whitney in 1868. Andtwo years later, another American,Richard Grant White, wrote in Wordsand their uses:

The distinction between these words,although very clear when it is onceapprehended, is liable to be disregardedby persons who have not had theadvantage of early intercourse witheducated English people. I mean Englishin blood and breeding ...

Examples of the 'errors' abound.One is not permitted to say I will be 30next week, because this sentence issaid to mean 'I have the intention of

being 30 next week' - an impossibil­ity, as age is something over which aperson has no control. Or again, itwould be wrong to say If I climb theladder, I will fall, because nobodywould have the intention of falling.

But of course, sentences of thiskind have been used throughout thewhole period of the debate, andcontinue to be used today. Who arethe main rule-breakers? As alreadysuggested, the Americans, Scots, andIrish seem never to have taken to thetraditional prescription. In thesedialects, will forms are found used forshall forms from as early as the 17thcentury, and these days the distinc­tion is hardly ever maintained. Theresult is a much simpler rule: use willfor all persons and meanings. Andgradually, this usage pattern has beenexercising its influence on EnglishEnglish too.

Today it is becoming less and lesscommon to hear shall used by Englishpeople of blood and breeding. Instatements (both positive and nega­tive), the shall forms are still quitewidely used, in the first person. Butin other persons there has been amassive tendency towards replace­ment by will. In questions, the onlyplace where it is now at all widespreadis, again, in the first person: Shall I doit? I last heard a second person formabout ten years ago, and it struck meas strange even then: an elderly lady,wanting me to move along a row ofchairs, so that she could sit next to herfriend, said to me, Shall you move

down?."I was so taken with the usage,and which form to use in reply, that Iforgot to move, and she left in a huff,muttering about manners in theyouth [sic] of today!

Is the distinction necessary, or is itsomething the language can dowithout? Those who object to thechange argue that a valuable distinc­tion is being lost, and that ambiguityis nowadays increasingly frequent.They list cases where a contrast needsto be made, such as Shall we havecoffee? (meaning 'Do you want somecoffee?') and Will we have coffee?(meaning 'Do you think there'll beany coffee available?'). Probably themost famous (apocryphal) semanticcontrast is the case of the Irishmanwho is supposed to have got intodifficulties while swimming, shoutedI will drown and no one shall save me!,was assumed by his English listenersto be doing it on purpose, and therebydrowned!

In a sense, there is no argument.The language has done without it,in that several important dialectshaven't used the distinction forseveral hundred years. As alreadysuggested, the Americans, Scots, andIrish have continued to live withoutit, for all except the most formalstyles. The distinction, said H LMencken in The American Languagein 1949, 'may almost be said to haveceased to exist ... except in the mostpainstaking and artificial varieties ofAmerican' . And most people inEngland do without it too, much of

the time, and don't seem to miss it.So why has the debate dragged on

for so long? I think it is because twoimportant issues have generally beenignored. People have not paid suf­ficient attention to the context inwhich shall and will are spoken. Andthey haven't listened carefully to howthey're spoken.

The first point, our knowledge ofthe context, is enough to resolve mostof the problems. It is context whichmakes it somewhat unlikely that wewould adopt the 'wilful' interpreta­tion of I will fall or I will drown. Andeven in the 'coffee' example, thelanguage gives us other ways ofexpressing the difference, if someonequeries the meaning - such as Iwonder if we'll have coffee? or Do youwant some coffee? There isn't really abasis for the fears of people likeWhitney that the loss of shallsymbolises a change in our ways ofthinking - that we now believe that allfuture events are determined by thehuman will. There are other ways ofsaying what we mean.

Stress, the degree of emphasis wegive to a word, is the second factor.When people are arguing aboutusage, the biggest danger is to payattention only to the words and not tothe way the sentences are spoken - tothe intonation, rhythm, and stress. Itis possible for two people to arguefuriously about what a sentencemeans and how it should be used, andyet each person has in mind adifferent version of the sentence.

WILL AND SHALL - A SURVEY OF SEVEN USAGE GUIDES

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lENGLISH TODAY No. 5 - JANUARY 1986 43

\ = statedo = not stated

[The survey speaks for itself; furthercomment would be superfluous. Ed.]

Modern English Usage, H W Fowler(ed. Ernesl Gowers), Oxford 1965

The Oxford Guide to the EnglishLanguage, E S C Weiner, 1983

The Britannica Book of English Usage,Doubleday-Britannica 1980

The Canadian Writer's Handbook,W E Messenger & J de Bruyn,Prentice- Hall 1980

Encyclopedia of English, A Zeiger,Coles, Toronto, 1979

The Careful Writer, Theodore MBernstein, Atheneum, New York, 1977

Longman Dictionary of the EnglishLanguage, grammar notes, 1984

A distinction is This distinction is This loss is to betraditionally made dying out and will is regretted.between will and shall general, especiallyfor the future tense. elsewhere than

England.

This loss is not aproblem.

This problem regularly turns up inthe case of shall and will, especiallywhen the debate is carried on inwriting.

In an unemphatic, informal con­text, the verbs are unstressed, and thecommonest version is ' ll. You canreplace the forms in all the abovestatements by 'll - for instance,

I'll be going out for a while.You'll get a reply in a week or so.I'll not be staying for long.I'll see him after dinner, and notbefore.M ary' II have a new dress.

There's no way of telling which ofthese' lis represents shall and whichwill.

The opposite situation, using astrongly stressed form, has a similarresult. The strong stress neutralisesthe distinction, adding an inescapableelement of volitional meaning to alluses, as m:

I WILL go out- you won't stop me.I SHALL go out-you won't stop me.You WILL get a reply -I'll see that

you do.

You SHALL get a reply -I'll see thatyou do.

The stress factor is often notconsidered when discussing thisproblem, and yet it is central. Muchof the confusion surrounding the18th-century arguments about the'true' meanings of these wordsprobably stems from a failure to keepthe stressed and unstressed versionsapart.

Moreover, with the focus on theeveryday spoken language comes anemphasis on the stylistic differencesbetween formal and informal lan­guage use. Many people operate thesedays with two styles of usage undertheir control - two standards, if youlike - an informal style and a formalone. I find myself following thetraditional shall/will rules in writingand in formal speech; and not usingthe distinction in everyday conversa­tion, where I don't think I ever useanything other than will or 'll.

But views still vary greatly. Somepeople object to the change on firstprinciples, that all change is a badthing. Others are more selective,objecting to it on the grounds that it is

'provincial'. Others object to itbecause they are worried aboutinconsistency, and want to maintain alogical distinction. Some indeedimpose a logical distinction of theirown - as did the philosopher, WilfridSellars, who wrote in his book Scienceand Metaphysics (1968): 'I am recon­structing English usage ... I shalluse "shall" and "will" in such a waythat "shall" always expresses anintention, whereas "will" is always asimple future.'

My own view is that grammarianshave made these two words carry anunnecessary burden of meaning.Much of the meaning of volitioncomes from saying the verb in anemphatic manner, and by reading infrom the context in which the word isused. Much of the meaning offuturity, likewise, is found in the restof the sentence - I'll be back tomorrow,He'll be 30 next week, and so on. It'snecessary to look at these broadercontexts, when working out thegrammar of a language. It doesn'thelp me solve the question of theSun's headline, though. Shall we sendthe piece to the editor to see what hesays?