Three levels of meaning: a case study of 'yiding' in Chinese

• Yingying Wang ^[1] ; Zheng Wei ^[1]
  1. [1] Hunan University

     Hunan University

     China

     
• Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 255, 2021
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper presents an analysis of the Chinese multi-functional adverb yiding. It is argued that yiding can act at three different levels of meaning, i.e., as an epistemic modal operating at the semantic level, as a slack regulator operating at the pragmatic level, and as a verum marker operating at the speech act level. These different uses of yiding share a common core, i.e., yiding always looks for the maximal value in some ordering, though the ordering is different in each case.