Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 42: 1911
Shall and Will An Historical Study By Professor Cornelius Beach Bradley University Of California I. The Modal Auxiliaries Shall and Will belong to a little group of verbs remarkable for the very great changes both of function and of meaning to which they have been subjected within the historical period of English. As regards function, in the earliest English they were still independent verbs, capable of complete predication either alone or along with the objects or complements common to other verbs. Their meanings, however, were such as to bring them more and more frequently into relation with infinitive complements, until in the end they lost their other uses, and became absolutely dependent on the help of an infinitive to enable them to make any statement whatever. Their parasitism thus rendered complete, they became what we know as modal auxiliaries. They furnish, that is, the formal predication which the tradition of our Indo-European sentence inexorably demands, and, at the same time, they add each its own subjective or modal color to the statement; but the essential notion or content of the predicate is not in them, but resides in the infinitive.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
