The Spanish-Chinese epistemic expressions at the lexical level

Abstract

The epistemic modality is a cognitive notion that is linked to the world view of the speaker, in particular, with his/her subjective judgment on the truth of the statement. To indicate an epistemic evaluation, we can use very heterogeneous linguistic resources of Spanish in the lexical level whose degree go from zero to maximum. Although Chinese and Spanish belong to languages with different roots and there are huge differences between them, epistemic expressions in Spanish can be translated into Chinese without any difficulty and without losing nuance. On the other hand, there are some typical epistemic expresions in both languages that do not have direct equivalents in the other, in this case, their equivalence relation is indirect.