英文摘要 |
Modals in a language convey speaker's attitudes and viewpoints. Conversations in daily life provide a stage for modals to express various kinds of information. The various types of modals, however, have defied classifications and analyses of modals. Focusing on yinggai and keneng in Mandarin Chinese, this article mainly deals with the difference of their semantic interpretations and the constraints on their syntactic distributions. It is claimed that, with either evidential or deontic reading, yinggai should be separated from keneng, which belongs to epistemic modality. By their various interpretations and distributional constraints, these two modals are divided and sub-classified. The interface between semantic readings and syntactic hierarchy of these modals positively reinforces the concept of generality among languages proposed in Cartographic Approach. |