Manifestation of Certainty in Semantics: The Case of Yiding, Rending and Dtiding in Mandarin Chinese

摘要

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