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yerbs

The system of verbs also changed.

A.    Modal verbs are words: shall, will, can, may, ought, etc. which modify tense or mood of a main verb but which cannot by themselves be the only verb in a sentence. They cannot in ModE be transitive verbs, they cannot take an object alone.

B.    Originally, modals were fuli verbs.

I can know musie (17c)

I shall owe to God and you (from Chaucer)

Ic maeg wel (OE - l'm good in health).

C.    Shall/should, will/would, may/might, can/could are distinctions that arose during this period to create a subjunctive mood (tryb łączności), in English comparableto Latin.

He insisted that I (should) go.

D.    Shall/will came to be restricted for forms of the futurę; they lost fuli status by the end of 16c.

-> In Bibie translation, will was used to translate Latin volo (desire, volition); shall came to be used for a generał futurę sense.

-> In everyday speech, the distinction came to be one of emphasis / shall, you will, he will is normal; / will, you shall, he shall is emphatic.

Idioms

The rise of idioms in modern spoken English sentences of words or a single word in which meaning is contextual or figurative ratherthan lexical.

-> Phrases such as how is it going, how do you do, became the idioms of everyday speech and relied on grammatical forms newly developed in the 16 and 17c. Spoken English after about the year 1600 became remarkably idiomatic, as these forms took on new functions and as the system of tense and mood marking changes.