The history of dare and the status of unidirectionality

In this article the historical development of the English semimodal verb dare will be presented in the light of the grammaticalization of the other English modal verbs. In a current version of Chomsky's principles-and-parameters framework we will investigate the morphosyntactic aspects of this process. Assuming that the modals in Old English are verbs that are generated in VP and subsequently move to a functional position, it will be argued that at the end of the Middle English period they were reanalyzed as functional elements generated in that same position. On the basis of the development of dare , which split into an auxiliary and a main verb, we will argue that grammaticalization is not necessarily a unidirectional process of language change. It characterizes the elimination of its synchronic instantiation, syntactic movement, and may bring about both grammatical and lexical elements.