shall then will

Pos   Tue Jul 03, 2007 6:52 am GMT
<<Agreed - "You're going to be alright" or "you're going to be okay" sound much more like the sort of usages that one would hear in Real Life here than "you will live" or, even moreso, "you shall live". >>

How about in this situation?

Mom: Why are you crying? What have you done now?
Young son: I fell and cut my knee! Owww!!
Mom: Let me have a look. Ah, nothing. Don't worry, you'll live.

...

BTW, nobody has answered my thread question yet. Why would the writer choose "shall" and the later "will"?
Pos   Tue Jul 03, 2007 6:54 am GMT
<<What I really meant was that an American would still recognize the difference between "No one shall rescue me" and "No one will rescue me": the first is a sort of command, while the second is more likely to be a declarative statement. >>

Are you saying that "will" cannot be a command in American English?
M56   Tue Jul 03, 2007 7:01 am GMT
<"No one shall rescue me" and "No one will rescue me": the first is a sort of command, while the second is more likely to be a declarative statement.>

If you think of this...

"Shall = According to my perception of the present situation, it is, if it's anything to do with me, inevitable that..." (Lewis 96)

you'll see that "no one shall" is as Kef says, a sort of command - "I shall/will not allow anyone to save me."
M56   Tue Jul 03, 2007 7:09 am GMT
BTW, Pos, I have no idea why the writer chose to alternate the forms.
furrykef   Tue Jul 03, 2007 8:07 am GMT
<< Are you saying that "will" cannot be a command in American English? >>

It can, but it all depends on context. For example:

Mother: Eat your peas.
Child: No! I don't want to!
Mother: You *will* eat your peas!

In this case, this is clearly a stern command. (This is almost like saying, "You will eat your peas, or else!" -- i.e., making a vague threat.)

Or, you could say something like this: "Let's split up. I'll go this way, and you'll go that way." But this is more like a proposition than an imperative, although in practice the listener might have little choice. I'm not sure what the grammatical term for this use of the future tense is, if there is one.

- Kef
Pos   Tue Jul 03, 2007 8:21 am GMT
<Or, you could say something like this: "Let's split up. I'll go this way, and you'll go that way." But this is more like a proposition than an imperative, although in practice the listener might have little choice. I'm not sure what the grammatical term for this use of the future tense is, if there is one. >

In contract, etc., do American lawyers use "shall", or do they use "will"?
Pos   Tue Jul 03, 2007 8:23 am GMT
<<<"Let's split up. I'll go this way, and you'll go that way.>>>

Why "ll in the second clause there?

Surely "Let's split up. I'll go this way, and you go that way." is more correct.
M56   Tue Jul 03, 2007 8:36 am GMT
<I'm not sure what the grammatical term for this use of the future tense is, if there is one. >

The use of the modal is "deontic" in "you"ll/you will go that way".
Mook   Thu Jul 05, 2007 2:34 pm GMT
>> <Doctor: "You will live !"
Patient: "What???"
Doctor: "You shall live!"
Patient: "That's much better!" > <<

>>Both sound unusual to my American ears. I would say something like, "You're going to be all right!"<<

>> Agreed - "You're going to be alright" or "you're going to be okay" sound much more like the sort of usages that one would hear in Real Life here than "you will live" or, even moreso, "you shall live". <<


How about [jl= lIv]?
Travis   Thu Jul 05, 2007 2:47 pm GMT
>>How about [jl= lIv]?<<

To me that is implicit in "you will live", as I do not expect writing to directly correspond to speech, while at the same time I expect the reader to carry out at least some degree of cliticization when reading, especially if they are reading off whole sentences (as one would normally do) rather than simply reading text word for word.
Travis   Thu Jul 05, 2007 2:52 pm GMT
At the same time, ["jM:"M\I:f] definitely sounds far more natural than ["ju:"wI:M"M\I:f], which is what I was thinking of when I read "you will live".

(The pronunciations above are my own, hence their looking weird.)
beneficii   Thu Jul 05, 2007 3:48 pm GMT
Furrykef,

=You can say "I'm going to drown", but "no one is going to rescue me" sounds odd.=

As a native speaker of American English, I actually disagree with you. "No one's going to rescue me" sounds like something I could use at some point. So I don't know, but there are little disagreements like this that make it difficult. Like some were saying that to a lot of native speakers "dribble paint on the floor" sounds weird, but to me not really. It doesn't seem like a bad form at all to use, though I don't think dribble is technically supposed to be a transitive verb.
beneficii   Thu Jul 05, 2007 3:49 pm GMT
As for shall v. will. Will seems to be a stronger statement, while shall implies intent for something to happen rather than certainty that it will, or at least that's what I've always thought.
Travis   Thu Jul 05, 2007 4:33 pm GMT
>>As for shall v. will. Will seems to be a stronger statement, while shall implies intent for something to happen rather than certainty that it will, or at least that's what I've always thought.<<

That might be true in dialects where both "will" and "shall" are preserved as semantically separate modals which are used throughout a full range of registers, but in very many dialects (and most to all North American ones) "shall" has been increasingly restricted to more formal usage and colored by fixed usages (such as the biblical "thou shalt not"), which has had the effect of making it stronger in practice than "will" in such dialects.
beneficii   Fri Jul 06, 2007 1:12 am GMT
Travis,

Yeah but the shall in "thou shalt not" still has a bit of intent behind it. It's not the same as "thou wilt not," which implies that it can never happen. "Thou shalt not" implies more that it should not happen.

Of course, in societies with lots of rules, perhaps this would be stronger.