I shall be 17

[Lynne Murphy]

>From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>

>And then there are those who follow The Rule (see discussion in
>archives), for whom "I shall be 17 next month" is an ordinary
>predictive future, while "I will be 17 next month" expresses
>determination or insistence ("I WILL be 17, and you can't stop me!").
>For such speakers, if any exist, "I'll be 17 next month" is
>presumably either ambiguous or (if the latter reading  is too
>stressed to permit contraction) "shall" only.

OK, now I'm confused.  I have the opposite intuition--and my intuition seems
to go along with the discussion of modals in Thomas Hofmann's _Realms of
Meaning_ (in which 'shall' is a speaker-oriented deontic modal).  For me, "I
shall be 17" is wrong because you have no control over it.  "Shall"
indicates a promise, and it's infelicitous to promise to be 17, considering
that you will be 17 whether you do anything or not.  "Will" for me indicates
a prediction.

Lynne
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.