Abstract
The purpose of this study is to compare the syntactic characteristics and examine the modal meanings of ‘boda' and ‘kan', which denote visual perceptual acts, in Korean and Chinese. The lexical meanings of ‘boda' and ‘kan' acquire their modal meanings through a process of semantic abstraction. Both ‘boda' and ‘kan' can convey the speaker's objective attitude towards a proposition and also express the occurrence of an event, thus exhibiting a dual modality function. They can be interpreted as either epistemic modals or event modals. This duality of modality function in ‘boda' and ‘kan' presents different syntactic characteristics, which are interpreted in terms of the structure of modality realization.
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