Status of DARE and NEED in Contemporary British Newspapers

Abstract

This paper is devoted to a morphosyntactic and semantic analysis of verbal constructions with DARE and NEED, distributed in contemporary British newspapers, with relation to grammaticalization. The theoretical part focuses on morphosyntactic characteristics of the lexical and modal variants of DARE and NEED, and further characterises formal properties of blend constructions with the verbs in question. Moreover, meanings of the individual variants and subsequently selected processes of grammaticalization concerning DARE and NEED are discussed. The analytic part consequently studies morphosyntactic features and meanings of the verbal constructions with DARE and NEED in British present-day newspapers.