Semantic Preferences of Biran and Yiding: A Distinctive Collexeme Analysis of Chinese Near-Synonymous Constructions of “Mod + Verb”

The Chinese modals biran ‘must be, definitely’ and yiding ‘must be, definitely’ can both express the sense of epistemic necessity. “Modal + verb” is a representative construction that expresses modal judgment. The semantic types of verbs used in the pattern may serve as crucial indicators to differentiate the semantics of the two modals. We employed Distinctive Collexeme Analyses to compare the attracted verbal collexemes between the two near-synonym constructions “biran/yiding + verb.” Data analysis was performed using a large-scale open-sourced corpus comprising approximately 2.5 billion Chinese words, collected from media articles spanning from 2014 to 2016. The results reveal that yiding is more likely to be associated with personal emotions, perspectives, and evaluations, whereas biran usually denotes impersonal causal consequences and trends. The proposed approach has the potential to differentiate the subtle semantic distinctions conveyed by diverse modal synonyms, which speakers may not even consciously recognize, and also offer methodological implications and empirical knowledge to the study of modals.