Need and dare: The black sheep of the modal family

The first aim of this article is to explore as exhaustively as possible the full range of modal usage found with the verbs need and dare in English, something which has never been done before. The second aim is to explain why these two verbs can exhibit modal-like behaviour. The reason is to be found in the fact that in certain uses they express a type of meaning which is analogous to that of the core medals, sharing with the latter the impression of ‘nonassertiveness’. This provides a valuable insight into the essence of the meaning of the modal auxiliaries in English and demonstrates convincingly that the morpho-syntactic behaviour not only of need and dare but also of the modals themselves is conditioned by meaning and not by syntactic rule.