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Shall
''Shall'' and ''will'' are two of the English modal verbs. They have various uses, including the expression of propositions about the future, in what is usually referred to as the future tense of English. Historically, prescriptive grammar stated that, when expressing pure futurity (without any additional meaning such as desire or command), ''shall'' was to be used when the subject was in the first person, and ''will'' in other cases (e.g., "On Sunday, we shall go to church, and the preacher will read the Bible.") This rule is no longer commonly adhered to by any group of English speakers, and ''will'' has essentially replaced ''shall'' in nearly all contexts. ''Shall'' is, however, still widely used in bureaucratic documents, especially documents written by lawyers. Owing to heavy misuse, its meaning can be ambiguous and the United States government's Plain Language group advises writers not to use the word at all. Other legal drafting experts, including Plain Language adv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Modal Verbs
The English modal verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality (properties such as possibility, obligation, etc.). They can be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participle or infinitive forms) and by their neutralizationQuirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Jan Svartvik, & Geoffrey Leech. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. (that they do not take the ending ''-(e)s'' in the third-person singular). The principal English modal verbs are ''can'', ''could'', ''may'', ''might'', ''shall'', ''should'', ''will'', ''would'', and ''must''. Certain other verbs are sometimes classed as modals; these include ''ought'', ''had better'', and (in certain uses) ''dare'' and ''need''. Verbs which share only some of the characteristics of the principal modals are sometimes called "quasi-modals", "semi-modals", or "pseudo-modals". Modal verbs and their features The verbs customarily classed a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Should And Would
The English modal verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality (properties such as possibility, obligation, etc.). They can be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participle or infinitive forms) and by their neutralizationQuirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Jan Svartvik, & Geoffrey Leech. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. (that they do not take the ending ''-(e)s'' in the third-person singular). The principal English modal verbs are ''can'', ''could'', ''may'', ''might'', ''shall'', ''should'', ''will'', ''would'', and ''must''. Certain other verbs are sometimes classed as modals; these include ''ought'', ''had better'', and (in certain uses) ''dare'' and ''need''. Verbs which share only some of the characteristics of the principal modals are sometimes called "quasi-modals", "semi-modals", or "pseudo-modals". Modal verbs and their features The verbs customarily classed as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Future Tense
In grammar, a future tense ( abbreviated ) is a verb form that generally marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future. An example of a future tense form is the French ''aimera'', meaning "will love", derived from the verb ''aimer'' ("love"). The "future" expressed by the future tense usually means the future relative to the moment of speaking, although in contexts where relative tense is used it may mean the future relative to some other point in time under consideration. English does not have an inflectional future tense, though it has a variety of grammatical and lexical means for expressing future-related meanings. These include modal auxiliaries such as ''will'' and ''shall'' as well as the futurate present tense. Expressions The nature of the future, necessarily uncertain and at varying distances ahead, means that the speaker may refer to future events with the modality either of probability (what the speaker ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States Government
The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 states, a city within a federal district (the city of Washington in the District of Columbia, where most of the federal government is based), five major self-governing territories and several island possessions. The federal government, sometimes simply referred to as Washington, is composed of three distinct branches: legislative, executive, and judicial, whose powers are vested by the U.S. Constitution in the Congress, the president and the federal courts, respectively. The powers and duties of these branches are further defined by acts of Congress, including the creation of executive departments and courts inferior to the Supreme Court. Naming The full name of the republic is "United States of America". No other name appears in the Constitution, and t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old Norse Language
Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlements and chronologically coincides with the Viking Age, the Christianization of Scandinavia and the consolidation of Scandinavian kingdoms from about the 7th to the 15th centuries. The Proto-Norse language developed into Old Norse by the 8th century, and Old Norse began to develop into the modern North Germanic languages in the mid-to-late 14th century, ending the language phase known as Old Norse. These dates, however, are not absolute, since written Old Norse is found well into the 15th century. Old Norse was divided into three dialects: ''Old West Norse'' or ''Old West Nordic'' (often referred to as ''Old Norse''), ''Old East Norse'' or ''Old East Nordic'', and '' Old Gutnish''. Old West Norse and Old East Norse formed a dialect conti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Auxiliary Verb
An auxiliary verb ( abbreviated ) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a participle, which respectively provide the main semantic content of the clause. An example is the verb ''have'' in the sentence ''I have finished my lunch.'' Here, the auxiliary ''have'' helps to express the perfect aspect along with the participle, ''finished''. Some sentences contain a chain of two or more auxiliary verbs. Auxiliary verbs are also called helping verbs, helper verbs, or (verbal) auxiliaries. Research has been conducted into split inflection in auxiliary verbs. Basic examples Below are some sentences that contain representative auxiliary verbs from English, Spanish, German and French, with the auxiliary verb marked in bold: ::a. Do you want tea? – ''do'' is an auxiliary accompanying the infinitive, ''want'', used h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gothic Language
Gothic is an extinct Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ... East Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the '' Codex Argenteus'', a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizeable text corpus. All others, including Burgundian language (Germanic), Burgundian and Vandalic language, Vandalic, are known, if at all, only from proper names that survived in historical accounts, and from loanwords in other languages such as Portuguese language, Portuguese, Spanish language, Spanish, and French language, French. As a Germanic language, Gothic is a part of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. It is the earliest Germanic language that is attested in any siza ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Preterite-present Verb
The Germanic language family is one of the language groups that resulted from the breakup of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It in turn divided into North, West and East Germanic groups, and ultimately produced a large group of mediaeval and modern languages, most importantly: Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish (North); English, Dutch and German (West); and Gothic (East, extinct). The Germanic verb system lends itself to both descriptive (synchronic) and historical (diachronic) comparative analysis. This overview article is intended to lead into a series of specialist articles discussing historical aspects of these verbs, showing how they developed out of PIE, and how they came to have their present diversity. Verb types The Germanic verb system carried two innovations over the previous Proto-Indo-European verb system: # Simplification to two tenses: present (also conveying future meaning) and past (sometimes called "preterite" and conveying the meaning of all of the following Engli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Procedural Law
Procedural law, adjective law, in some jurisdictions referred to as remedial law, or rules of court, comprises the rules by which a court hears and determines what happens in civil, lawsuit, criminal or administrative proceedings. The rules are designed to ensure a fair and consistent application of due process (in the U.S.) or fundamental justice (in other common law countries) to all cases that come before a court. Substantive law, which refers to the actual claim and defense whose validity is tested through the procedures of procedural law, is different from procedural law. In the context of procedural law, procedural rights may also refer not exhaustively to rights to information, access to justice, and right to counsel, rights to public participation, right to confront accusers as well as the basic presumption of innocence (meaning the prosecution regularly must meet the burden of proof, though different jurisdictions have various exceptions), with those rig ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prescriptive Grammar
Linguistic prescription, or prescriptive grammar, is the establishment of rules defining preferred usage of language. These rules may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax, and semantics. Sometimes informed by linguistic purism, such normative practices often suggest that some usages are incorrect, inconsistent, illogical, lack communicative effect, or are of low aesthetic value, even in cases where such usage is more common than the prescribed usage. They may also include judgments on socially proper and politically correct language use. Linguistic prescriptivism may aim to establish a standard language, teach what a particular society or sector of a society perceives as a correct or proper form, or advise on effective and stylistically felicitous communication. If usage preferences are conservative, prescription might appear resistant to language change; if radical, it may produce neologisms. Prescriptive approaches to language are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thou
The word ''thou'' is a second-person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, having been replaced in most contexts by the word '' you'', although it remains in use in parts of Northern England and in Scots (). ''Thou'' is the nominative form; the oblique/ objective form is ''thee'' (functioning as both accusative and dative); the possessive is ''thy'' (adjective) or ''thine'' (as an adjective before a vowel or as a possessive pronoun); and the reflexive is ''thyself''. When ''thou'' is the grammatical subject of a finite verb in the indicative mood, the verb form typically ends in ''-(e)st'' (e.g. "thou goest", "thou do(e)st"), but in some cases just ''-t'' (e.g., "thou art"; "thou shalt"). Originally, ''thou'' was simply the singular counterpart to the plural pronoun '' ye'', derived from an ancient Indo-European root. In Middle English, ''thou'' was sometimes abbreviated by putting a small "u" over the letter thorn: þͧ. Starting in the 1300s, ''thou'' a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Germanic Strong Verb
In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is a verb that marks its past tense by means of changes to the stem vowel ( ablaut). The majority of the remaining verbs form the past tense by means of a dental suffix (e.g. ''-ed'' in English), and are known as '' weak verbs''. In modern English, strong verbs include ''sing'' (present ''I sing'', past ''I sang'', past participle ''I have sung'') and ''drive'' (present ''I drive'', past ''I drove'', past participle ''I have driven''), as opposed to weak verbs such as ''open'' (present ''I open'', past ''I opened'', past participle ''I have opened''). Not all verbs with a change in the stem vowel are strong verbs, however; they may also be irregular weak verbs such as ''bring, brought, brought'' or ''keep, kept, kept''. The key distinction is that most strong verbs have their origin in the earliest sound system of Proto-Indo-European, whereas weak verbs use a dental ending (in English usually ''-ed'' or ''-t'') that developed later with th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
