Native speakers’ judgment of the epistemic evidentiality of synonym verbs of “think” in Mandarin : a corpus-based study of Renwei, Yiwei, Juede, Kaolü, and Xiang

Abstract

The synonym of epistemic “think” in Chinese is understudied. This study surveys the usage of five synonyms of verbs related to “think” – renwei, juede, yiwei, xiang, and kaolü – by using the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese. By studying the contexts of the target verbs, we report the distributions of three types of nouns and two types of adverbs in relation to the target verbs among three genres, and then we discuss their potential effects on epistemic evidentiality. Next, we conduct a survey study to examine native speakers’ judgments of the epistemic evidentiality of sentences that contain the five target verbs with the types of nouns and adverbs extracted from the Sinia corpus. The results show that “renwei” has the highest ratings of evidentiality, followed by “juede,” while “yiwei” and “xiang” have the lowest mean ratings. “Kaolü” is often regarded as irrelevant or neutral concerning epistemic evidentiality.