This paper examines three modal adverbials in Mandarin Chinese: yiding, kending and duding. These three lexical entries can all express epistemic necessity or intensification. However, denoting intensification, kending and duding have additional semantic requirements. First, they both require that there be at least one alternative to the proposition they present. Second, the speaker uses kending to ascertain the truth of a proposition it takes, although all the alternatives are potentially true. Third, duding is used to assert the certainty that only the proposition it takes is true. Concerning certainty, two cases are demonstrated here. For yiding, certainty is used implicitly, because certainty manifests itself through the speaker's attitude. However, for kending and duding, certainty is revealed explicitly, since (part of) the semantics of these two lexical items is certainty.
展开▼
