No, but some of the things he says makes you wonder.
Eg: "Sensitive English speakers which most of us are not" will distinguish between
"I will but I shan't"
and
"I shall but I won't"
The OED has this quote with perplexed me:
"No Scot ever yet mastered his `shalls' and `wills'"
This is evidenced in the well-known joke about the Scotsman who fell into the
pond. He shouted
"I will drown, and no one shall help me!"
with the the bystanders -- this was Richmond pond, in Surrey, next to the deer park,
thinking that's what he wanted, left him alone.
Of course with the aid of Grice's formalism
-- which an American critic refers to as "mannered and artificial", f and i
we get
(1) I will drown and no one shall help me.
"I will drown" is just "will" as a mere marker of futurity -- were we HAVE to disimplicate the sense of 'free will' (As an American correspondent told me: You must be wrong because I'm a determinist and I still use 'shall', especially in dance halls")
When it comes to the second conjunct,
(2) "No one shall help me",
the point is that 'the Scotman uttering' this is NOT to be included (otherwise we get a fallacy, vide Warner, Intro to Grice, Aspects of reasoning. On "Everybody loves my baby but my baby don't love nobody but me -- nobody but me". "Surely the idea is NOT that you are your own baby").
Reading the Merriam Webster (Americans as they are) does not help. Pity Hare died. He said that Austin's dialect was 'odd'. For it would allow things like
(3) I will but I shall not.
and
(4) I shall but I will not.
Surely, Hare notes, "if the meaning of 'shall' and 'will' is distinct, you _could_ say things like that."
"Or are we to say this is just one of those Gricean odd conversational implicatures?"
"Nay. This is more like a Moorean entailment. A breach of your moral code. Your synthetic a priori, if you have one."
I'm not so sure.
It surely sounds pragmatically _odd_, if not downright otiose, to say it.
and cfr.
(5) It will rain but I won't believe it.
(6) It shall rain but I shan't believe it.
M/W quote:
(6) "He that will have a May Pole shall have a May Pole."
This is a maxim with them.
William Congreve, Concerning Humour in Comedy, 1695.
Of course, if you don't think that there is a distinction there, the maxim is a _tautology_, i.e. equivalent to,
"he that will have it will have it".
My hunch is that these people did make a difference. An odd one, but a difference at last/least.
In this regard, (6) contrasts with an example that M-W quote as exemplifying the _American_ use of "shall" vis a vis some opinion (e.g. by Pamela Hansford Johnson) that the Americans don't use 'shall' ("And then you suddenly find out, if you're an English writer, that no American really says 'shall' [...]. Quoted in The Writer's Place, ed. Peter Firchow, 1974).
The American usage quoted is by President Truman:
(7) So I've sent Hopkins to Moscow and Davies to London.
We shall see what we shall see --
Harry S. Truman, diary 22 May 1945.
I.e. "we shall see what we shall see" (as said by Truman) in this way
contrasts with "he will have what he shall have" -- variation on (6).
But then he WAS a true man.
Must say I was warmed by Wm. Cobbett's remark to his son. Apparently, he
wrote a grammar just to his son, as he should. He (the son) never used it, but that's neither here nor there.
One chapter of Cobbett's grammar reads:
(8) I need not dwell here on the uses of 'will', 'shall',
'may', 'might', 'should', 'would', 'can', 'could' and
'must', which
uses, various as they are, are as well
known to us as
the use of our teeth and our noses.
(1823).
--- This has an innuendo referring to his son's self-abuse ("and the use of your prick you shan't know")
M-W interpret this as Cobbett saying that it's the native speaker's intuition, if you are a Cobbett, that counts.
But then, if the Scot thinks that 'shall' means 'will' and 'will' means 'shall', so be it.
_His_ problem was swimming in Richmond, rather. (Is this, or can this, geographical accidence solve the philosophical puzzle?)
Talking of Scots, M-W also quote Alford 1864 who said that he
"never heard an Englishman who misused 'shall' and 'will' but had never
heard a Scotchman who did not misuse them sometimes".
Which makes you wonder that "Grice" _is_ Scots for pig. Cfr. 'Grice Rule' in the wiki.
Fowler
-- the author of that dictionary Grice gave a hoot what it says --
was also thinking that the English have some superior intuitions here, when he writes -- as cited by M-W:
"of a distinction between those "to the manner born" -- in this case the English -- and those not so lucky."
Like Brecht and company, I would say (Grice sides with Brecht here -- as he quotes him in "Intention" -- which should read Intutition, rather, "And Uncertainty". (But then he could be counted to rally to the defense of an underdogma).
Interestingly M-W go on to say that Fowler yet found place to criticise the
modern usage of 'shall' and 'will' as it was mis-used by the press.
Not by the Daily Telegraph. All the _other_ press.
M-W add:
"Fowler listed several pages of what he regarded as misuses culled from
British newspapers, but his faith in the English English rules never
wavered, perhaps because of his belief that the British press WAS
CONTROLLED BY THE SCOTS""
So that closes the vascuous circle, I assume.
Other quotes I found of interest in M-W are:
(9) I have no desire to return to England, nor shall I,
unless compelled.
Lord Byron, letter 12 Nov 1809.
I like his use of "desire to return".
Etymologically, of course, "will return" would (sic) have done here.
I am also warmed by his caveat, "unless compelled".
For, if "shall" has a sense of "obligation" as it apparently has (i) this sense is confined to the 'future' though.
Which is _odd_ for why can't an obligation refer to the present or the past.
'Thou shalt not kill' need not refer to the
_future_.
But more importantly,
(ii) what kind of an obligation is it?
It seems it can be mitigated by clauses like
"if not compelled not to do it".
Byron is using here the negated form, "nor shall I". i.e. "I shall not".
Had he written, we hope,
"I do desire to return to England, and I shall"
the puzzle arises as to how he thinks he could or WOULD go on to qualify this?
I submit, humbly and alla Grice:
"I do desire to return to England, and I shall, unless prevented".
But we know that NOTHING prevented him there, so there.
M-W notes that
'will' can have
an imperative force
sometimes. This is interesting, or uninteresting, as the case may be. For if you are native and you have to go by the etym. of 'will' and 'wollen' with the help of a German friend, he'll point out, as he did point out to me, that in Russian, "velet" means "order". (Recall that the Russians defeated the Hun in WW2).
The example in M-W is:
"Notice that "will" can be used with second and third
persons to give directions:
(10) You will therefore retain the manuscript
in your own care.
Lord Byron, letter 23 Aug 1811.
But back to the former colonies, another puzzling instance of an American using 'shall' is by General Douglas MacArthur:
(11) I shall return.
-- General Douglas MacArthur, on leaving the Philippines,
11 Mar 1942.
which was refuted by the course of events. He never. The M-W have a similar entry for "should, would" which closes rather amusingly:
"The point to be remembered here is this: the uses of "should" and "would"
are more varied than those of "shall" and "will" and the traditional rules,
shaky as they are for "shall" and "will", tell us even less about "should"
and "would". And we have not even tried to examine all the uses of "should" and "would" (you can find these recorded in a good dictionary)".
They add, to provoke me:
"Lifelong NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH MOSTLY HANDLE THESE WORDS WITH COBBETT'S ATTITUDE - they do whtat comes naturally and do not worry. LEARNERS HAVE MORE OF A PROBLEM, BUT THEY SHOULD FOLLOW THE PRACTICE OF NATIVE SPEAKERS..."
When in Rome, ...
"...AND NOT BECOME ENSNARED IN ARTIFICIAL DISTINCTIONS", even if they are made by your favourite Heart-of-England heart-and-soul hearty!
Etc.
-- Refs.
"Grice in America, or more Grice to your Mill"
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