Shall and will in the Corpus of History English Texts

Abstract

This paper deals with the meanings of the verbal forms shall and will in the late Modern English period, as evinced in the Corpus of History English Texts (1700-1900). Earlier literature on modal verbs in historical periods includes Fachinetti (1997) and Gotti (2003). We study these modals using corpus tools in order to identify the senses of these two verbs in context and to group findings according to meaning. Our notion of modality mainly follows from Palmer (1986; 2001), Hoye (2008) and van der Auwera and Plungian (1998). Conclusions show that these verbal forms had indeed modal meanings, even if their periphrastic use to indicate future was evident.