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.

中文翻译：

---

含义的三个层次：以汉语为例的案例研究

本文对汉语多功能副词的用法进行了分析。有人认为，语气可以在三个不同的意义层次上起作用，即，作为在语义层次上起作用的认知模态，作为在语用层次上起作用的松弛调节器，以及在言语行为层次上起作用的语言标记。yiding的这些不同用法共享一个公共核心，即yiding总是以某种顺序寻找最大值，尽管每种情况下的顺序是不同的。