I hardly dared breathe

Question

The "Extra Examples" section in the entry of DARE in the Oxford Learner's dict. shows I hardly dared breathe.

Dare here forms its past as a (semi)modal verb, yet the position in the sentence of the adverb, hardly, is not the cannonical one after a modal and before the next main verb. Why is it so?

OED: DARE and HARDLY

Until a couple of centuries ago, *I dare hardly think* was actually more common than *I hardly dare think. Obviously that's a shift in idiomacy, not meaning*. — FumbleFingers, Nov 19 '20 at 14:05
@FumbleFingers *One need hardly be* so bold in one’s typography! :) Notice how hardly counts as a negative and so elicits the special uninflected versions of semi-modals (one need not do, one dare not do, one ought not do) that work far more like full modals by taking a bare infinitive not a to infinitive, and which are today restricted to negative and interrogative contexts alone. — tchrist, Nov 19 '20 at 14:12
Changing the adverb position changes the meaning of the sentence. I hardly dared breathe vs I dared (to) hardly breathe. I think that goes part of the way in explaining the word order. — FeliniusRex - gone, Nov 19 '20 at 14:13
https://oed.com/oed2/00057596 and https://oed.com/oed2/00102589 — GJC, Nov 19 '20 at 15:00
I don't follow this. "Do I dare to eat a peach" seems parallel to "Will he decide to eat," "Can he hope to eat," etc. Such verbs are "modal" for this reason? In each case an adverb seems suitable after the pronoun: will he foolishly decide to, can he still hope to, etc. What's special about the original example is that the word "to" may be omitted from the infinitive, suggesting an analogy to "he can slowly walk," "he must slowly walk" rather than "he slowly can walk," "he slowly must walk"? — Chaim, Nov 19 '20 at 20:30
@Chaim No, don't think of negatives as adverbs. Hardly is a negative which is why I cannot hardly eat a peach is a confusing and probably forbidden double negative. Do I dare not eat a peach? and Do I not dare eat a peach? are exactly the same. Similarly I need hardly eat a peach every day and I hardly need to eat a peach every day seem the same to me, although I can't quite explain why the second doesn't trigger suppression of the to as a negative would. Maybe for that case it really does become an adverb instead of a negative. Have to ask John Lawler. — tchrist, Nov 19 '20 at 21:31
@tchrist The original question approves (1) “I can hardly breathe” and (2) “I hardly dared breathe,” and disapproves (3) “I dared hardly breathe.” It asks why the word “hardly” separates verbs in (1) but not (2), and considers verb tense and the distinction of modal verbs as reasons to expect (3) rather than (2). You approve (4) “I need hardly eat a peach” and (5) “I hardly need eat a peach” and disapprove (6) “I cannot hardly eat.” You broach the distinction between adverbs and negatives and the suppression of the word “to.” — Chaim, Nov 20 '20 at 15:13
Let’s set aside (6) for the moment. If I may attach the word “to” to each infinitive, all of these judgments come out the same for me if we replace “dare” with a word like expect, hope, need, refuse or want, and if we (also or instead) replace “hardly” with a word like always, sometimes, never, quickly or quietly. I agree that in (6) negations are a problem. But I don’t think that they’re the original problem. — Chaim, Nov 20 '20 at 15:13
I think that the sense of the words is the real problem. It sounds strange to say that I quietly want to do something, because wanting cannot be noisy. I think the correct answer to the original question is that we simply put the adverb in the position that reflects the sense most logically, that I (1) hardly breathe or (2) hardly dare. The objection to “I dared hardly to breathe,” as something like “I dared to hold my breath,” is an unrelated problem of word order, more to do with the message that we expect to hear, the occasional weirdness of adverbs before the “to” of an infinitive, etc. — Chaim, Nov 20 '20 at 15:44
@Chaim This is simply negative raising, and it makes no difference because of that. — tchrist, Nov 20 '20 at 17:40
@tchrist Do you understand the formal annotation used here? https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WU0YTlkM/homer_neg_raising_web.pdf — GJC, Nov 20 '20 at 20:00
@FumbleFingers macmillandictionary highlights hardly dare and hardly dare (to) breathe (PHRASE) (https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/dare_1) — GJC, Apr 13 '21 at 08:33
@GJC: True, but they don't mention that in 1800, *to dare hardly breathe* was apparently more common than *to hardly dare breathe*, as pointed out by my first comment — FumbleFingers, Apr 13 '21 at 13:05
@FumbleFingers not really in the past though, why? https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dared+hardly+breathe%2Chardly+dared+breathe&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&case_insensitive=on&corpus=26&smoothing=50&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdared%20hardly%20breathe%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chardly%20dared%20breathe%3B%2Cc0 — GJC, Apr 13 '21 at 15:10
@GJC: Your link just shows the general trend (*to dare hardly [do something]* has been almost completely displaced by *to hardly dare [do it]* over the past couple of centuries). But if we focus on the years 1750-1820 it seems that people *dared hardly breathe* much more often than they *hardly dared breathe*. — FumbleFingers, Apr 14 '21 at 12:47
@FumbleFingers huh? error: Search for "hardly dared breathe" yielded only one result. error: Search for "dared hardly breathe" yielded only one result. — GJC, Apr 14 '21 at 13:29
@GJC: Is this going anywhere? I just set an earlier date range on your NGram query link Apparently you'd set "graph smoothing" to the maximum possible value 50, which can lead to potentially misleading charts (the more so when you restrict the "barely dared" activity to the specific word *breathe, leading to far less matches). If you don't want to accept my point that the acceptability of the sequence to dare hardly* has gone down over the past couple of centuries, let's just agree to differ. It was never that important anyway. — FumbleFingers, Apr 14 '21 at 13:35

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 03 '21 at 21:36

According to Oxford's "A Practical English Grammar", "dare" is, as you mentioned, a "semi-modal" as well as an auxiliary verb.

Then in the section related to "Adverbs of frequency", such as "hardly", there are two guidelines that can help us understand why "hardly" in this sentence is placed before the auxiliary.

The first guideline is, of course, the one that makes us a little bit confused about your example, it reads:

With compound tenses, they [adverbs of frequency] are placed after the first auxiliary, or, with interrogative verbs, after auxiliary + subject

But the second one may help resolve the confusion by saying:

Frequency adverbs are often placed before auxiliaries when these are used alone, in additions to remarks or in answers to questions:

Can you park your car near the shops? - Yes, I usually can.

and when, in a compound verb, the auxiliary is stressed:

I never can remember.
She hardly ever has met him.

That is probably why in the example you provided, the adverb "hardly" before the auxiliary "dare" sounds natural and is grammatically correct, since the auxiliary "dare" has kind of an emphatic meaning and is naturally stressed in the sentence.

I hardly dared breathe

1 Answers1