TITLE:
Expressions of Propositional Modality in Japanese and Chinese
AUTHORS:
Xiangdong Liu
KEYWORDS:
Epistemic Modality; Evidential Modality; Japanese; Chinese; Noda
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.4 No.1,
February
18,
2014
ABSTRACT: This study investigates expressions of propositional
modality (epistemic and evidential) in Japanese and Chinese. It aims to
highlight some fundamental characteristics of and differences between the modal
systems in the two languages. It has been found that adverbs in Chinese play a
more important role than adverbs in Japanese in expressing modal meanings. This
study has also found that more modal expressions are used in the Japanese text
than in the Chinese translations. That is to say, Chinese language speakers
seem to prefer straightforward assertions to marked epistemic forms. In other
words, Chinese speakers often choose realis modality when describing things,
situations or their own ideas, unless the speaker thinks it is very necessary
to clearly indicate that the proposition is not an absolute fact, or has not been
confirmed to be a truth. Data of this study are collected from a
Japanese-Chinese bilingual corpus, and the discussion is based on a concept of
realis/irrealis.