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Welcome back Larry; I thought you were dead.Even if you are stick around as the forums favourite zombie. It's actually the only example of 'and nor had he' in the British National Corpus. The author is P. D. James. It took me a considerable time to work out what it meant. Maybe we're simply talking ...

It's being confused with "how are you?".

When you Google a word that doesn't exist Google still gives you the hits for its nearest equivalent.

The Corpus of Contemporay American English has two hits for 'rediciulious', one from 1773, compared to 2,500 + for ridiculous.

DTE(E)LLS stands it seems for Diploma in teaching English (ESOL) in the Lifelong Learning Sector. In my generation we had reading lists with less words than that diploma. Perhaps you could look at qualifications in the 60s and see if Jones's law Mark II (the value of a qualification is in inverse de...

Claims on how many words people use depend on how you count them. The general figure for most people is around 30,000.

The 50% figure you quoted has been well debunked by Pullum et al at Language Log. Words such as 'a' and 'the' take up a considerable percentage. Three words take up 13% of this post.

The context of reporting speech isn't hard to spot, I mean. You are either reporting speech or you aren't

That's clear. But we're talking about the use of backshifting in reported speech. How do you explain that?

Elsewhere we need an all encompassing meaning, but here we must stick rigidly to our list of functions? I would say that if we are dealing with modals we should stick to the list of functions, since there is no all encompassing meaning. The present situation we have with the modals is clear formall...

"Will" is a form which expresses a fixed view of future time.

"Going to" expresses that something is to be expected.

What relationship, if any, does either statement have with reality?

Anyway, something in the past is gone, and something in the present is not. Reported speech makes both choices logical (unless something is well in the past, in which case you must use the past) and the implications are natural enough. Whatever, it is one more very well defined context, and Lewisia...

As I said, it seems to me that viewing will as the fixed future goes a very long way, and naturally we will use that for definite predictions (while using the weaker going to for assumptions based on evidence around us). Why do you call 'going to' the weaker form? 'Going to' again has two usages. F...

I ignored the vocabulary examples because I don't think they're remotely relevant. With regard to backshifting in reported speech just take this one example. There is a famine and some relief workers drive past a man who flags them down. One speaks to him, and when he gets back in the cars the other...

What we end up if we follow your method is a long list of non-common meanings that take up dozens of pages, have to be learnt by heart, and have no apparent logical connection between them. The concept of 'distance' explains every example of the use of the past over the present that I can think of. ...

"Going to" is for set plans. "Will" is for when we decide our plans at the moment of speaking. This is a common statement, for example-

True, but will is also used for predictions about the future so
"What'll you do tonight?"
"I'll go to the cinema."
may refer to something fixed.

The alternative to teaching the core meaning is to teach a long list of disparate usages without any apparent link between them. Larsen-Freeman is the most egregious example of the latter approach, and the comment somebody once made about Swan, "If he's the solution, l'll stick with the problem" app...

the pointlessness of teaching, let alone looking for, any kind of core meaning to modals, especially "should", I'd have been cheering him/her* all the way. I agree. Lewis goes overboard on this. I remember having long discussions on the affair with our resident American poster who has deserted us f...