He knew she dare not tell her father.
Kim daren’t tell them so I had to do it myself.
— The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, p109n
My mother tongue, Korean, has tense inflectional options: to have tense agreement in a sentence or to put tense inflection only onto the last verb. The example cases remind me the Korean rule. So when I interpret English in my brain two or more past tenses in a sentence, I naturally ignore the other past tenses except one.
What I now want to know is that the pattern of the above cases be only restricted to ‘dare’, or are there more cases that in a sentence one verb is past, and the other present?
(I know in some cases, present perfect is replaced by simple tense for a kind of simplification.)
Answer
To dare not is a very dated construction – effectively a “set phrase” which is probably best avoided.
Precisely because it’s unfamiliar/not current, I think many Anglophones would be ambivalent about whether it should be knew she dare not (7,060 hits in Google Books) or knew she dared not (52,000 hits). Theoretically, I think the verb tense should depend on whether she still dares not, but I doubt many people would see it that way.
The modern “natural” phrasings would be…
He knew she did not dare [to] tell her father.
Kim did not dare [to] tell them so I had to do it myself.
Personally, I don’t think the tense forms in OP’s examples are particularly relevant to modern usage.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Listenever , Answer Author : FumbleFingers
