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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 25, No. 0, pp.876-893
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2025
Received 13 May 2025 Revised 28 May 2025 Accepted 10 Jun 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.25..202506.876

English How Dare Construction: A Case of Grammatical Constructionalization

Okgi Kim
Academic Research Professor, Institute for the Study of Language and Information Kyung Hee University 26, Kyungheedae-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, Korea, Tel: 02) 961-0211 okgikim@khu.ac.kr


© 2025 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

how dare questions, auxiliary dare, lexical dare, grammatical constructionalization, diachronic, EEBO, COHA

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the summer conference hosted by the Korean Society for Language and Information, held on June 14th 2025. I thank the audience and the two reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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