English verbs selecting Bare forms

[Robert Levine]

Hey, I have to insist that everyone stop harrassing Tibor for his
queries. We should all let him ask anything he wants without fear of
droll responses.

BTW, the cases of `need' and `dare' are kind of bizarre. In one
avatar, they display typical auxiliary behavior---they invert, they
tolerate (actually require, in my speech anyway) a following negative
element and occur in neg-contracted form and so on. They actually look
like reasonable candidates for treatment as modals (which they never
cooccur with), except for the fact that for many speakers, apparently,
the following is good:

    If we had dared do that, everyone would have been down on us like a
       ton of bricks.

Very strange...

cheers,

Bob