As in, “I will go to the store tomorrow.” A friend says it is the future tense of “to be” but that doesn’t sound right to my ungrammatical ear. Is it “to be” or just a weird mutant word by itself?
Merriam Webster:
It’s a modal auxiliary verb. Google on the phrase for more info.
It’s now just a modal verb - one that changes the mood of the main verb. It has its origins in a perfectly normal verb - “to will”, as in “She willed it so”. At least that’s the story I’ve heard. It originally expressed volition; “I will go to the store” meant, more or less, “I want to go to the store”, but the emotional significance disappeared and it simply became a modal that marked future time. It’s not from a future tense of “be” - English doesn’t have a true inflectional future tense.
It’s one of a small class of verbs in English that are only used as auxilliaries, and which lack some of the forms that normal verbs have (including an infinitive form). Examples are (I don’t think this list is complete, but it’s pretty close):
can / could
may / might
shall / should
will / would
Note that all have a present and past tense – I don’t think any English verbs exist in just one tense – though the meaning might vary a little between those two tenses. “Will” has a present participle too, “willing”, unlike the others, used in phrases like “God willing”.
Something about the explanation of “will” on that link doesn’t make sense. It its example of “Insistence; habitual behaviour” it says:
Is this right? To me, this sentence has two possible meanings:
-
The first sentence is present tense (“I am not surprised”) while the second sentence is a future prediction (“You will keep talking”.) If the second sentence is meant to explain the first, shouldn’t “will” be left out of it altogether?
-
The first sentence is present tence, and the second sentence is a command (“You will keep talking”.) This makes even less sense.
So what’s up with this?
Mindfield, that usage sounds like archaic UK English - circa Enid Blyton/Evelyn Waugh. In that context it is indeed descriptive of habitual behaviour.
I have a hangover because I will keep drinking.
I have a hangover because I [habitually] keep drinking.
Not many people use this form anymore, but people of my grandparents’ age do sometimes.
Ah! That would explain why it sounds odd to my Under-40 Canadian-bred ears. Was there a reason for this usage in archaic UK English? It seems frivolous even in that context – the sentence just seems not to call for a modal verb at all. Was not necessarily used as a modal verb but instead served some other purpose?
At one time, English (on both sides of the Atlantic) made a distinction between simple futurity and determined intent. The forms for simple futurity were “I/we shall” and “you/he/she/it/they will,” and the forms for intent were “I/we will” and “you/he/she/it/they shall.” Beginning around World War II (and intensified by Douglas MacArthur’s grammatically accurate but misunderstood “I shall return”) and continuing apace to the present, that distinction has been eroded away, to the point where even the most precisionist of speakers will often fail to make the distinction.
There’s certainly no dialect I’m aware of that makes this distinction reliably; I don’t think even Received English maintains this distinction all that carefully. Was it ever actually something speakers did, or was it always a prescriptionist rule that was widely ignored?
The verb “use” is like this as well.
It can be used like in this very sentence, meaning “to utilize”.
It can also be used to set past tense: “I used to bicycle more 10 years ago.”
It’s definitely used in a periphrastic habitual past sense, but it’s not the same as will or could, which (as mentioned) lack an infinitive, and also don’t show the -s ending in the third person singular (e.g. **Cans she play sitar?*) There’s unique morphological properties of modals in English, and other verbs used in periphrastic constructions don’t count as modals because they don’t have those properties. Like go, which is used in a periphrastic future, as in I’m going to conquer Kazakhstan - but it has an infinitive, and infinitive verbs following it retain the particle to, and it has a third person singular form with -s in the present tense.
According to Follett, it was a very common distinction among careful writers and speakers, a bit more common in British than American speech but standard in writing in both countries. And it was as common, apparently, in “unconscious usage,” as “If I were…” and similar usages. I presume we’re talking Victorian era through the 1920s and 30s. But I’ve never seen anyone using it consistently in my lifetime, except prescriptivists talking about it.