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Complete the royal gossip's diary entry about the terrifying new Queen.
Choose ALL the grammatically correct ways to state that the palace staff are too afraid to make eye contact with her.
The correct answers are The servants dare not look her in the eye, The servants do not dare to look her in the eye, and The servants do not dare look her in the eye.
Dare is a fascinating marginal modal that frequently blends rules!
- Modal use: dare not look (No do-support, no third-person 's', bare infinitive).
- Lexical use: do not dare to look (Uses do-support and a to-infinitive).
- Blended use: do not dare look (Uses do-support, but drops the "to" before the infinitive). This is highly common and perfectly correct in negative and interrogative sentences!
"Dare not to look" is incorrect because true modal dare cannot be followed by "to". "Dares not" is incorrect because the subject is plural, and modal dare never takes an "s" anyway.