Shall and Will in English Grammars

The future tense in English has been difficult to understand and describe, particularly where rules for the verbal auxiliaries shall and will are concerned. The impression that rules for shall and will were largely the fabrication of 18th-century grammarians was first created by the work of Charles C. Fries. Evidence from the grammatical tradition, however, does not warrant the conclusions Fries drew. Whereas Fries suggested that the first hint of a differentiation in the use of shall and will was in Mason’s grammar (1622), evidence strongly suggests that even before Mason, grammarians hinted at differences in the uses of the two auxiliaries. Fries credited John Wallis (1653) with the definite rule for shall in the first person to correspond with will in the second and third; actually, the distinction was made before Wallis. Fries credited Lowth (1762) with the rules for interrogative sentences, yet a full discussion of questions is found in Maittaire (1712). Fries indicated that the first complete scheme of conventional rules was found in William Ward (1767), yet Ward was anticipated by James White (1761). Fries implied a closer relationship between Ward and Murray (1795) than the evidence warrants. And Fries provided no evidence for his assertion that the rules became a standard feature of English and American grammars only after 1825. Thus the rules for shall and will were actually remarkably perceptive, if incomplete, descriptions of an elegant usage of some speakers of the language, framed in spite of methodological restrictions of the tradition grammarians worked in.