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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod

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Summary Details


Query:   sum: will and shall in journal writing
Author:  M Shuib
Submitter Email:  click here to access email
Linguistic LingField(s):   Syntax
Text/Corpus Linguistics

Summary:   A few weeks ago I posted the following question:

**I am doing a study on the use of modals by journal writers. Among
other things, I found that many of the writers in my data employ
the modals will and shall in volitional sense interchangeably .
i.e. One of the writers, for example, at the beginning of his article
uses volitional will as in :

THE ORGANISATION OF THIS PAPER IS AS FOLLOWS.
FIRST, WE WILL PROVIDE A GENERAL BACKGROUND TO
COMMUNICATIVE APPROACHES ....

and then, at a later stage of his article, he changes to volitional shall,
as in:

I SHALL SUGGEST IN THE DISCUSSION OF THE MODEL THAT ...


What I would like to know is whether you yourself adopt this approach
in your journal or dissertation writing If you do, could you please
offer some explanation. **


Some of the people who responded said that the use of will/shall in
journal writing is a matter of style and consistency. M. Fryd, for
example , puts down such fluctuations to 'straightforward bad
writing'. others gave the following comment:

1. Sherri Condon (condo@usl.edu)
Most Americans do not distinguish shall and will

2. Rick Mc Callister (rmccalli@sunmuv1.MUW.Edu)
In American English the use of shall sounds archaic or pedantic

3. J. DeChicchis ( jed@ue.ipc.hiroshima-uac.jp)

It is difficult for the reader to perceive a semantic difference for
shall/will. This difficulty is not a reflection of the language
proficiency differences of foreign and native readers. This kind of
inderminacy has been reported for modal usages in cross-dialectal
contact situation.

Some of the people who responded argue that the two examples i gave
above have no volitional overtone at all. They state that the modals
above are simply used to indicate futurity.

While I agree that there is some element of futurity in the examples,
there is also, in my view, a sense of volition involved. Both of the
modals above can be paraphrased as '....intend to ...' which I take
as the chief feature of volitional meaning. For those who think that
the idea of volition for will and shall is a wishful thinking on the
part of older grammarians, I would recommmend you to refer to
1. Coates, J (1983) The semantics of modals and modality
2. Butler, C. (1990) Modals in scientific writing, in Nash (ed) The
writing scholar

Thank you for everybody who responded to my query

LL Issue: 8.93
Date Posted: 23-Jan-1997
Original Query: Read original query


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