I shall be 17

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:36 PM +0000 4/12/01, Lynne Murphy wrote:
>>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

The Rule, as we've discussed here, stipulates that SHALL is deontic
(i.e. dealing with intention, obligation, etc.) in the 2d and 3d
person and epistemic (denoting simple futurity) in the 1st, and vice
versa for WILL.  The classic minimal pair is

I shall drown; no one will save me!    [despairing swimmer]
I will drown; no one shall me!            [determined would-be suicide]

As we've also discussed, it's not clear any naive speakers ever
actually followed The Rule as it was prescribed.  For most
contemporary U.S. English speakers, "shall" is pretty rare outside
(and sometimes even inside) interrogative-form 1st person examples
with a variety of uses.

larry