Semantic And Pragmatic Analysis On Modal Verb "děi/dé" In Modern Chinese

One approach to the study of the modal verb “得” in modern Chinese is tocategorize its modal meanings. Though discussions in this field are fruitful, few studiestake the verb alone as their research object. Moreover, when studying it from theperspective of semantics, most scholars argue that polysemous “得(dě)” expressesepistemic and deontic meanings while monosemous “得(dé)” only expresses the deonticmeaning, but few argue that “得” as a whole has dynamic use. Besides, when discussingthe deontic meaning of “得” in terms of the traditional definition of deontic modality,scholars ignore that the meanings of obligation and interdiction can also be expressedby the imperative mood so that these meanings can be analyzed from both semantic andpragmatic perspectives. From above we can conclude that the incomplete classificationof the modal meanings of “得” and the single perspective of the related researches arethe limitations.This thesis, by qualitatively analyzing the meanings of the modal verb “得” in theinstances chosen from other researchers’ studies, CCL and the Internet from theperspectives of semantics and pragmatics in terms of Nuyts’s theory of modality, aimsto solve the problems hanging in the previous researches. Nuyts redefines three basicmodal categories, namely, epistemic modality, dynamic modality and deontic modality,and proposes some alternative views on the field from the perspectives of bothsemantics and pragmatics. He argues that deontic modality should be defined as anindication of the degree of modal desirability of the state of affairs expressed in theutterance, while the traditional subtypes of deontic modality, i.e., obligation, permission,interdiction, etc., should no longer belong to it, and instead, they can be connected withthe imperative mood, analyzed from the perspective of pragmatics. Through analysis,we find that the modal meanings of “得” can be not only epistemic and deontic, but alsodynamic. Its meanings of obligation and interdiction are directive and there are relationsand differences between its directive use and its use in the imperative mood.