shall/will

I get a feeling that in (a) the authority of the speaker is clear, but in (b) it is not. Am I right?

All elections shall take place on schedule.

All elections will take place on schedule.

Technically, you are right. Traditional grammarians have said that "shall" in the first person merely says something about the future whereas "will" connotes a strong resolve. So based on this rule, a person who says "I will go to the store" has a much greater desire to actually go to the store than somewhon who says "I shall go to the store."

Yet here is where it gets confusing: In the second and third persons, the meanings of the two terms switch places. "Shall" becomes the stronger of the two and connotes a strong resolve. "It shall happen" should, according to this rule, have much more force to it than "it will happen."

But in reality most native speakers (at least those who live in the southern USA, where I'm from) pay little attention to these two tangled rules. Most everybody says or writes "will" and considers "shall" a rather high-flown, somewhat pedantic word. In order to convey nuances of meaning, they simply rely on stress. If a man wants to make a mere statement about the future, he says "I will go to the store today." If however he wants do convey a strong resolve, he says "I WILL go to the store today."

And it's the same with your two sentences. We do not feel the speaker's authority when he says "All elections will take place on schedule." But if he redistributed the stress in his sentence and said "All elections WILLtake place on schedule," then his authourity would be manifestly plain.

In (a) the speaking means that the elections will take place and that can't be otherwise because he has decided so (or he will do anything to prevent them from not taking place).

That was a good explanation. As well as the grammatical rules that determine meaning, there are also other things such as 'emphasis'. In a sense what makes it really difficult, is that each individual person has their own individual way of talking. So, for some people, if they say, 'I shall do something', it could be mere wishful thinking. It might mean, I shall do something, unless nothing more interesting crops up.

Similarly, 'I will do something' tends to imply a high degee of determination. But it is easy to imagine a situation, ie in playing a will you, or won't you game, in which it means nothing at all.

It is almost like Picasso the painter. First of all he learnt all the rules, and he became very technically proficient at painting conventional paintings. He then developed his painting by breaking the rules and doing something different, that no one else had done before. Look at books of Modern english literature, I am thinking in particular of "Filth" by Irvine Welsh. Incidently, it is not a book I would recommend.

Synopsis
With the festive season almost upon him, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson is winding down at work and gearing up socially - kicking off Christmas with a week of sex and drugs in Amsterdam. Irvine Welsh has here created one of the most corrupt characters in contemporary fiction.

I shall sell the house. = Futurity.
I will sell the house. = I am going to sell the house. = Intention.

>>Technically, you are right. Traditional grammarians have said that "shall" in the first person merely says something about the future whereas "will" connotes a strong resolve. So based on this rule, a person who says "I will go to the store" has a much greater desire to actually go to the store than somewhon who says "I shall go to the store."

Yet here is where it gets confusing: In the second and third persons, the meanings of the two terms switch places. "Shall" becomes the stronger of the two and connotes a strong resolve. "It shall happen" should, according to this rule, have much more force to it than "it will happen."<<

You mean traditional southern English grammarians; such never really applied much outside southern England, and even the prescriptivists here in North America did not care too much about it.

>>But in reality most native speakers (at least those who live in the southern USA, where I'm from) pay little attention to these two tangled rules. Most everybody says or writes "will" and considers "shall" a rather high-flown, somewhat pedantic word. In order to convey nuances of meaning, they simply rely on stress. If a man wants to make a mere statement about the future, he says "I will go to the store today." If however he wants do convey a strong resolve, he says "I WILL go to the store today."<<

The matter is that "shall" ("should" aside) really does not exist in everyday speech and even most semiformal or formal speech in North American English, and "shall" is always marked in its usage. And this really does not apply just to southern NAE but rather to NAE in general.

>>And it's the same with your two sentences. We do not feel the speaker's authority when he says "All elections will take place on schedule." But if he redistributed the stress in his sentence and said "All elections WILLtake place on schedule," then his authourity would be manifestly plain.<<

One thing, though, is that in normal spoken usage one will normally not say a separate "will" in places like these but rather instead used the cliticized "'ll", which will consequently contrast with actually using a separate "will", which is the more marked and formal or emphatic case.