English How Dare Construction: A Case of Grammatical Constructionalization

• Published in: Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics Vol. 25; pp. 876 - 893
• Main Author: Kim, Okgi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 한국영어학회 01.06.2025
• Subjects: 영어와문학
• ISSN: 1598-1398; 2586-7474
• DOI: 10.15738/kjell.25..202506.876

This paper investigates the diachronic aspects of a relatively understudied type of special wh-questions in English: how dare questions (HDQs), as in How dare you do this to me? Based on extensive corpus data from EEBO (Early English Books Online, 1470s–1690s) and COHA (Corpus of Historical American English, 1820s–2010s), we demonstrate that while HDQs in Early Modern English show morpho-syntactic and complement variation—including the use of various inflected forms of dare—those in Present-day English overwhelmingly favor the uninflected form dare that takes a bare infinitive as their complement. Building on the historical shifts of HDQs, they are argued to have undergone grammatical constructionalization, which is characterized by three interrelated changes: increased syntactic productivity, increased schematicity, and decreased compositionality (or increased idiomaticity). This diachronic perspective sheds light on the evolution of HDQs into an idiomatic construction in recent usage. KCI Citation Count: 0