marginal modal auxiliary

[نور المصطفى]

marginal modal auxiliary
marginal modal auxiliary: a verb which carries the same kind of meaning as one of the modal auxiliaries. Marginal modal auxiliaries can be used either as auxiliaries (e.g. without do-insertion in interrogative and negative sentences), or as catenatives. Marginal modal auxiliaries are dare, need, have to, used to. They can express either root or epistemic meaning, and have both finite and non-finite forms.

Marginal Modal dare

The auxiliary dare is unique among modals in that it both allows DO-support and exhibits a past tense form. It clearly falls in modal position since no other auxiliary (except do) may precede it in linear order21.7. Examples appear below.
she dare not have been seen .
she does not dare succeed
Jerry dared not look left or right .
only models dare wear such extraordinary outfits .
dare Dale tell her the secret ?
Louise had dared not tell a soul .

As mentioned above, auxiliaries are prevented from having DO-support within the XTAG system. To allow for DO-support in this case, we had to create a lexical entry for dare that allowed it to have the feature mainv+ and to have base mode (this measure is what also allows dare to occur in double-modal sequences). A second lexical entry was added to handle the regular modal occurrence of dare. Additionally, all other modals are classified as being present tense, while dare has both present and past forms. To handle this behavior, dare was given similar features to the other modals in the morphology minus the specification for tense.