Three levels of meaning: A case study of yiding in Chinese

Abstract

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.