Thirsty for Knowledge Thursday #1: Shall

I decided that I wanted to have a day where I do a regular post, kind of like Lushbaugh’s Fish Friday and how the big sis always posts her weight loss (and sporadic, unfortunate gain) on the same day of the week. Since I had so much fun posting about phrasal verbs on Katie’s page yesterday, I thought that maybe I could make linguistic randomness a regular part of my own site. After all, this will keep my hand in over the long and empty summer and also help me to refresh a lot of the diverse information I’ve learned once and may have since then forgotten. While I thought it appropriate to start with phrasal verbs since I mentioned them on the sister’s site, I decided instead to work with shall. So here’s to the start of “Thirsty for Knowledge Thursdays,” from here on out abbreviated to TKT (I thought about making it “TNT” because knowledge technically starts with an /n/, but then I’d have to make it “ΘNΘ” to account for the fact that thirsty and Thursday don’t really start with /t/ either.) for purposes of succinctness. Let’s begin, shall we?

Shall is what we call a “modal verb.” It’s a type of auxilliary verb like the forms of to have or to be before the main verb as in “I have eaten the whole pie” or “he is being an ass.” Since shall is a modal, it is irregular in that its form never changes. Unlike most verbs, it never takes an -s in the third person (e.g. “he dances” versus “he shall dance” and not “*he shalls dance”), and is generally considered to be tenseless, although historically speaking should is its past form and can still sort of function as such.

The main concern most people have with the modal shall is when to use it. A lot of people vaguely remember learning some very special rule about shall in English classes in grade school, but most people can’t remember what it is exactly. Shall, therefore, gets infrequent or bizarre use, and is falling out of everyday speech. In fact, shall is used so infrequently in North American English (NAE) that English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers don’t bother teaching it to ESL students other than to recognize it if they do hear or see it. So how is shall used?

First, shall is used in requests for a decision or advice from the person addressed. So if Bob is speaking to Eve, he might ask “Shall I order for us both?” in order to get Eve’s opinion and/or input. Should is also used here regardless of tense (hence the “tenselessness” aspect of most modals) and is probably more frequent.

Second, shall is used in tag questions (another linguistic feature I’ll highlight another day) as in “Let’s go, shall we?” Tag questions themselves impose an entire other set of rules on the use of shall, and since research has shown that men use tag questions less than women, that means a fair part of the population is statistically less likely to use shall in this way than the rest.

Third, shall is used in statements which establish a new topic, often heard in speeches or informative papers as in “Next, we shall examine the differences between X and Y” or “Finally, I shall discuss the effects of monkey poo on deep shag carpeting.” It has been my experience that this sort of usage is reserved for academic purposes or at least an altered use which is more formal than a person would normally speak. It is this use of shall which is most likely connected to what high school English teachers are teaching their students.

Shall does have another use, specifically in frozen formulas or locutions (another up-coming topic). Shall is often used in invitations to perform an action, which have become more fixed and are more readily recognized like “Shall we dance?” or even simply “Shall we?” before performing the action such as leaving or eating. “Shall we dance?” is like asking “Would you like to dance?” but in a different tone. If it were changed to “Should we dance?” the tone would change completely and it would no longer be an invitation but a question asking if it is advisable to dance. The use of shall in invitations is a question of register (another topic for discussion) or tone, and some people use shall to be funny or facetious or as an affect.

Sometimes shall is used in formal commands like “You shall report to me at nine o’clock sharp” or “You shall not speak unless spoken to,” but even this usage is occasional. This form is most recognizable in the ten commandments as in “Thou shall not steal,” and often when people are trying to imitate this style, they’ll use the older familiar form of you (yet another topic in and of itself) and shall as in “Thou shall not eat all my taquitos in one sitting!” Seriously, who uses this form sincerely?

All of which brings us to the final point: the old prescriptive rule which grammarians force on our children to learn for one test and to never remember exactly again. Grammarians use prescriptive rules (arbitrary and constructed ones) whereas linguists use descriptive rules (rules which describe how languages are actually being used by contemporary speakers), and so far I have given you the descriptive rules for shall. The prescriptive rule is this: “use shall to express future time with I and we, use will elsewhere.” As you can see, this prescriptive rule rarely applies. First, I have already pointed out that most modals are tenseless, so the specification for the future tense is already inaccurate. In addition, I have used shall with you and he as well as the archaic thou. This shows that it isn’t used with I and we alone. Perhaps if people weren’t so concerned with the prescriptive rule they vaguely remember from grade school, they might use shall more often because they wouldn’t be worrying about “getting it wrong.” The prescriptive rule no longer applies to NAE, but I suppose that doesn’t really matter because the use of shall is rather on the decline anyway and may end up in the archaic pile like thee and thou already have.

So there’s my lesson on shall. I’ll try to come up with more interesting examples in future ramblings, and I’ll also try to be more succinct or pick topics which are smaller. I’ve already got a little list going in my head of future topics, and if anyone has a language-based query they’d like answered, just post it and I’ll find the answers and post them. Thanks for humoring my need to teach and to talk about linguistics. Happy Thursday!