Back to the Future

English is a very outré language in that it does not have an inflected conjugation for its verbs in Simple Future tense. In fact, it technically has no Future tense at all—all it has is a way to form a clause in the future, but there is no inflectional base as can be seen in the Present and Past tenses.

For starters, its Simple Past tense is usually made up of verbs that are inflected with -ed morphemes to form a weak past tense such as can be seen in verbs like cambered, sneaked, wrecked, and granted. Other verbs have a strong past tense as seen in verbs such as did, ran, spoke, and brought. Then there are verbs that can be both like stove/staved, rove/reeved, gelt/gelded, and smelt/smelled.

Since English has no actual future conjugation, it must be constructed using two modals usually. Those modals are "shall" and "will". It can also be constructed by using a conjugated form of the "to be" verb as seen below:

To Be + Going+Infinitive=Future Tense

Example:

I am going to be there shortly.

Now getting back to the modals "shall" and "will". In modern English, these two auxilliary verbs are easily the most confounded of all. For the most part, the modal, "will" has superordinated itself as the dominant one of the two, yet there is still a semantic difference and below I shall give it to you:

MODERN ENGLISH SYNTAX
Simple Future Tense: to be

1. I shall be
2. You will be
3. He/She/It will be
4. We shall be
5. You will be
6. They will be

In modern English, the Simple Future takes "shall" in 1st person constructions whereas "will" assumes control of 2nd and 3rd persons. Although this is the technical, semiotic construction, it is seldom spoken like this in, at least, American English wherein the modal "will" arrogates 1st person as well. For the most part then, "shall" only survives in its interrogatory form as shown below:

Examples:

Shall I call a taxi?

Let's go, shall we?

Shall we go to the movies?

There is another construction, though for those of you who want to know whether "shall" can be used in 2nd and 3rd person and here it is:

Emphatic Future Tense: to be

1. I will be
2. You shall be
3. He/She/It shall be
4. We will be
5. You shall be
6. They shall be

The Emphatic Future tense is used when one wants to make an exclamation. Instead of predicting what is probably going to happen, it states that nothing is going to stop it from happening or that whatever is about to happen is guaranteed to happen. Below are some examples:

You shall obey me! (This is a command. The person is being ordered to obey the speaker.)

You will obey me! (While many native speakers say it this way and while grammatical rules have attenuated on this matter, a semiotician would still say that the speaker is predicting that this person is going to obey him sometime in the near future.)

Mrs. Olsen, I shall not be in school tomorrow. (The speaker is predicting to Mrs. Olsen that he is going to be absent from school tomorrow for some unknown reason in the sentence.)

Mrs. Olsen, I will not be in school tomorrow. (The speaker is not predicting anything here; he is telling Mrs. Olsen that there is no chance of his being in school tomorrow either because he refuses to go to school or something so important has happened or is going to happen that nothing on Earth could make him attend school. In other words, this is either a refusal to attend or the speaker is guaranteeing that he is not going to be there.)

I will win this game. I will not stop until I have won. (Nothing is going to stop the speaker from winning. He is not predicting that he is going to win; he is guaranteeing it.)

We will return! (And nothing shall stop us.)

In the end, it can be really confusing so if you should still be confused as to how to use the modal "shall," then you ought to stay away from using it as much as possible. It's one thing to know how to use it, but if you plan on throwing it out for everyone to hear, you had best be prepared to get some looks because it brings with it an air of pretension.

With that said, it is still necessary to understand because its meaning does change when a person tries to use "shall." For instance, Fowler, a renowned English lexicographer, once wrote a famous example of the semantics involved here in his famous treatise on "shall" and "will." He said this in his treatise to explain the semantic difference:

I shall drown. No one will save me. (Fowler considered this to be a cry for help from a person who is in imminent danger. This person wants someone to save him from a certain death.)

I will drown. No one shall save me. (And no one will because this is a suicide cry. The person wants to drown and does not want anyone to save him from his certain death.)

While the above sentences may sound silly and utterly pedantic to say the least, the literal meaning still exists there. This is the reason that it is best that one not throw out the word "shall" without knowing how to use it. In the end, however you might choose to couch your words is your choice alone, but you should take this as a caveat—"shall" is a dangerous word in English so use it wisely.