Not your usual shall/will question

No, I get the * for the shall reading as well. I think shall is either imperative or intentional, and neither of these work with an oven.

Prawn said:

No, I get the * for the shall reading as well. I think shall is either imperative or intentional, and neither of these work with an oven.

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Actually, intention does make sense, if in a roundabout way.

"If you push the red button, the oven shall turn on."

This could be read as the "purpose of the button". Compare:

"If you push the red button, the oven should turn on."

The should here could express two things: a) the oven should turn on, but I could be wrong, b) the oven should turn on, but the button/oven's broken.

"Shall" could be read as the same thing with more certainty, or as a general expression of the speaker's intention for the button.

Um, neither? In technical documentation, you must be as clear as possible and part of that is using present tense, not past or future.

I would say, "When you push the red button, the oven turns on." Using "will" (or shall) is frankly confusing. If I push the red button, when will the oven turn on? In 20 minutes, in 2 seconds? When?

I still use "shall," I don't understand why it is considered "historical."

zwol said:

Dawnstorm, if the sentence were quoted from a design document, specifying how the buttons on an oven ought to behave, then it would be just fine for me, by the magic of context. Then the imperative is directed at the reader, who is going to build the oven, and therefore has agency over what the red button does. But it's not okay in a user manual, because there's nobody in context who has that agency. At that point, the button does what it does.

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Not what I meant. There's intention in the way the button works, and that intention could trigger the "shall".

Compare:

A: Aren't you going to take an umbrella?
B: It won't rain.
A: But it might.
B. It won't.
A: But it might.
B: It shall not rain, dammit!

No agency, just "intention". Now, considering the above put yourself in the situation of the manual writer. "Press the button and the oven shall come on." This carries, at least to me, an implicit concession that things could go wrong, so it's safer to point towards the button's purpose rather than towards its function; the purpose remains even if the button is broken.

zwol said:

1. If you push the red button, the oven will turn on.
2. *If you push the red button, the oven shall turn on.

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You're talking about the future here--what is going to happen if the button is pushed. I mention that because that's one of the two ways "will/shall" are used--call it "Will/Shall #1." In this use, the second sentence is glaringly wrong, because in standard British English (which is one of the few dialects that still uses "shall," and is also the dialect from which the word originally came), you can't use "shall" as you have in the second sentence simply because you only use "shall" in the first person (I shall, we shall). You would never say "he shall" to describe what he was going to do in the future; instead you'd say "he will." Thus, you can't say "the oven shall," because the oven is third person (he/she/it). I know this explanation sounds strange, but trust me, it's true. Here's a link: http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/english/data/d0082787.html

Then there's "Will/Shall #2." This second way to use shall/will is to express choice or intention. And in this use, the rules are the opposite: "I will buy the red car" shows your choice or intention; "He shall buy the red car" shows, depending on context, either the third person's choice or intention (the speaker is saying "he's going to decide to buy the red car"), or the speaker's choice/intention about what that third person will do (the speaker is saying "I'm going to make him buy the red car"). As in the US Constitution, "No person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime..." (That sentence is in the passive voice ["be held"], so the sentence doesn't say whose intention it is, but it expresses what you might call an abstract, impersonal intention: the intention of the Constitution's framers was that no person should be held... yada yada.) In this use, as in the use where person A says "Person B shall not...," it becomes a choice imposed by one person on another person or people, and thus it becomes a command.
Anyway, here's a link on this use of shall/will (second set of bullet points):
http://www.writersblock.ca/tips/monthtip/tipjul96.htm
So obviously, because this use of "shall/will" expresses intention or choice, it cannot be used with an inanimate object like an oven. So, there is simply no correct way to use "shall" in your sentence #2.

Also, I lived in England for years and got used to people saying "shall"--and I actually winced when I read the second sentence; that's how weird and wrong it sounds to anyone who is accustomed to British English.