English verbs selecting Bare forms

[g-green at uiuc.edu]

(Since when did "droll" ever hurt anyone?)

Seriously, while _need_ and _dare_ (also _better_ as in _You better be on
time!_)
did come to mind when I first read Tibor's query, their behavior is not only
idiosyncratic
(none are exactly like the modals, which is why in the '60s they were
referred to as "quasi-modals" (not a joke!), and each has quirks (not
another joke, see below) of its own), but also quite variable across
speakers.  For instance, Bob says _need_ and _dare_ occur in neg-contracted
form. This is clearly true of _need_, but _daren't_ and _dasn't_ sound
old-fashioned and dialectal (respectively) to me. (_Better_ is probably like
the modals ONLY in requiring a base form complement; at least, it doesn't
have a contracted form, and doesn't occur in ANY inverted forms I don't
think:
    *Better you go?
    *Do you better go?
    *Never better you do that again! (cf. You better never do that again!)
    *Such better be your answer.
Historically, _better_ is surely a contraction of "had better", and at first
glance, other fossilized contractions seem to have much the same behavior:
      druther (< would rather)
      gotta   (< have got to)
      use to (< used to)
      hafta  (< have to)
THe last two require do-support:    Did he [yus] to do that? Do I [haef] to?
I bet the old Quirk, Greenbaum etc. has pages on this.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Levine" <levine at ling.ohio-state.edu>
To: <J.Nerbonne at let.rug.nl>; <jansche at ling.ohio-state.edu>
Cc: <hpsg-l at lists.Stanford.EDU>; <tibor at linguistics.ruhr-uni-bochum.de>
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 9:03 AM
Subject: Re: English verbs selecting Bare forms


> 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
>