Re: Word usage in English dialects // was Slang, curses and vulgarities

Paul Bennett wrote:
> Maybe I'm an oddball (it has been suggested in the past), but I'm British,
> and I use "shall" all the time (in any register above Low), along with a
> bunch of other prescriptivist claptrap. I'm entirely unsure as to which
> facet of my past caused this, as I certainly didn't go to schools that
> valued prescriptivism, though I seem to have been doing it from quite an
> early age. Maybe I'm just a natural-born stickler. I do know that I have
> had more compliments than complaints, at least in regard to my formal and
> semi-formal writing.
No, Tristan and Andreas are rather exaggerating the death of "shall".
It does exist, but in many dialects, such as mine, it is only slightly
more alive than "whom", and when I use it, it has a definite literary
feel. The same applies to any instance of "should" which is not
transparently a deontic modal auxilliary.   I am given to understand
that, at least at one time, the peculiar prescriptive rule to use
"shall" in first person, "will" in second and third", actually had
some basis in descriptive fact in the dialects of southern England,
but I think it's safe to say that the situation even there has changed,
though I'm not sure to what. Anyways, that may explain your situation.

-------------------
In a completely separate matter, why did I not receive my digest of
the list yesterday?  Is it because one of the messages was carrying
something suspiciously looking like a virus, and my university's
mail server automatically filtered it along with everything else?

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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