I shall inform you if the situation changes.
We shall succeed where others have failed.
In future statements which have I or we as the subject, Leech (1989, 426) argues, shall is an older and more formal equivalent of will often found in English literature written before 1950. Quirk and Greenbaum (1973, 47) also state that will is nowadays generally preferred, except in 1st person questions. However, using the contracted form ‘ll avoids the problem of choosing between shall and will:
I will/shall arrive tomorrow.
He’ll be here in half an hour.
2.1.2 Use with 2nd and 3rd person subjects
Although COBUILD English Usage (1992, 622) advises the learner not to use shall after any pronoun except I or we, Leech (1987, 88) argues that shall is, in fact, used with 3rd person (often inanimate) subjects in rules and regulations. Therefore, he states, shall is often found in documents that are legal or quasi-legal. In addition to highly formal regulations, shall is also used in the rules of a card game, for instance. However, in this kind of use, Leech argues, it is possible to replace shall by must because of the idea of an obligation or a command. However, shall in this kind of meaning is not easily substituted with other verbs:
A player who bids incorrectly shall forfeit fifty points.
The hood shall be of scarlet cloth, with a lining of the colour of the faculty.
In addition to rules and regulations, shall has other uses, too, with 2nd and 3rd person subjects. However, shall is here often replaced with will in modern English. For example, shall can be used when making a threat. Close to this is the idea of insistence introduced by Quirk and Greenbaum (1973, 54):
You shall do as I say.
He shall be punished.
Another use of shall is making a promise. Jespersen (1933, 276) argues that this use has the idea of an obligation on the part of the speaker. However, COBUILD English Usage (1992, 622) states that using shall in this kind of meaning sounds old-fashioned and therefore, is also frequently replaced by will:
You shall have the money as soon as I can get it.
You shall not find me ungrateful for what you have done.
2.2 Shall in questions
Leech (1989, 426) introduces three different kinds of uses of shall in questions: offering to do something, asking about some future event or asking for advice or suggestions.
(1) Shall I...? or Shall we...? are generally used in making an offer. In these kind of questions, Leech (1987, 89) states, the speaker is consulting the wishes of the listener. Therefore, the will of the person addressed is important and, in fact, Leech states that Do you want me/us to...? can be used as a way of rephrasing:
Shall I open the door?
Shall we carry those bags for you?
(2) Shall we...? is also used in making suggestions about the future or as a tag question after Let’s. The suggestions involve the speaker and therefore, we usually means you and I. Leech (1987, 89) adds that Do you agree with my intention to...? conveys the same meaning:
Shall we go abroad?
Let’s go to Morocco, shall we?
(3) Shall I...? or Shall we...? can also be used when asking for advice or suggestions:
What shall I do?
Where shall we go this afternoon?
In addition to these uses introduced by Leech, Jespersen (1933, 277) states that shall can also occur in 3rd person, in which case the will of the person addressed is again of importance. This is made clear in the following examples given by him:
When shall the wedding be? (asked a person who is in charge)
When will the wedding be? (asked a person who is not in charge)
When is the wedding to be? (possible in both cases and nowadays frequent)
Jespersen adds to this arguing that questions starting in 2nd person Shall you...? are about the pure future, which makes them contrary to Will you...? which refers to willingness. However, he states that Shall you...? can be used even if the future is dependent on the will of the addressee in cases where it is not the will, but the future that needs to be made certain:
Shall you see John today?
When shall you be back?
3 Uses observed in the data sample
In addition to different grammar books, the British National Corpus (BNC) online search facility is a very useful source of information. I have examined a random sample of 50 examples of shall of the 19, 814 examples available. In these examples shall was clearly most frequently used with 1st person subjects with a total of 38 example sentences. Shall in these sentences was mostly used in statements indicating intention and prediction with 15 examples of each. Examples of questions, there were seven, which is a relatively large number. However, these did not include any examples of questions in the second or third person introduced by Jespersen (1933, 277):
KC0 1053 I’ve never read it, but I shall.
EF0 1331 As we shall see, his parables largely concern male characters.
KBW 19265 Shall I throw this out? FNT 3157 Shall we go?
According to the corpus data, the use with 3rd person subjects is clearly less frequent with only 11 examples of the total of 50. However, what is interesting about these sentences, is that they are all categorised as rules and regulations:
B3A 380 The board of the faculty shall deem a student to have withdrawn....
FRB 871 The democratic process demands that ministers shall be accountable....
As there was only one example of the use of shall with 2nd person subjects in the 50 samples, I did an additional search on they shall and you shall. In these examples shall was most frequently used in old-fashioned / biblical contexts or threats / insistence respectively:
ALH 722 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
FSJ 53 If you don’t put that knife away, I promise you shall die a criminal’s death under the law.
4 Conclusion
In this essay I have discussed various uses of shall in different contexts. By using both grammar books and a corpus data, I have taken into consideration not only how the grammarians advise the learner to use shall, but also how shall has actually been used by native speakers. The corpus gives a good overall view of the frequency of shall. For example, it showed very clearly that the main use of shall is with 1st person predictions about the future, in which cases it can usually be replaced by will. Furthermore, what also became evident, is the fact that with 3rd person subjects, shall is mainly used in rules and regulations.
References
Jespersen, O. (1933) Essentials of English Grammar. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.
Leech, G. (1989) An A-Z of English Grammar and Usage. London: Edward Arnold.
Leech, G. (1987) Meaning and the English Verb. Second edition. London: Longman.
Quirk, R. & Greenbaum, S. (1973) A University Grammar of English. London: Longman.
Sinclair, J. et al. (1992) Collins COBUILD English Usage. London: HarperCollins Publishers.
The British National Corpus online search facility: