This article examines if English auxiliary shall is really dying, where it is still used, and why it is dying, and then speculates how long it will survive in what constructions. Our method of the examination is the search of the large-scale corpora like the COHA (The Corpus of Historical American English), which shows the relatively long-term changes of (American) English because it covers the recent 200 years (1810s-2000s) and the BNC (The British National Corpus), which is British English data. There have been so many reports about the disappearing shall-future, e.g. Mair and Leech (2006: 320), which are borne out through our examination of the corpora. The search result is the confirmation of the report that shall is dying. But it is not dead yet. It is still widely used mainly in the 1st person construction. The obsolescence of shall has been caused by both language-internal and external factors. Language internally, the loss (or grammaticalization) of the original lexical meaning of shall, i.e., 'obligation' or 'necessity', is the main reason for its reduction, because the remaining 'pure future' meaning can be expressed by will or other expressions like be going to. In general, language does not tolerate two words or constructions of the same meaning or function that can be exchanged each other anytime. Language externally, such factors as Americanization and colloquialization intervene in the loss of shall. Nevertheless, we cannot predict the complete disappearance of shall with certainty, because not a few historical changes leave the so-called historical remnants. Therefore, we cannot exclude the possibility that shall remains to be used in a certain formal situation or in a number of formulaic uses.

• 이필환(계명대학교)