Comparative Study Of "Neng" "Hui" And "Keyi"

In our Chinese teaching practice, we find that foreign students usually confuse or make mistakes in the usages of"Neng""Hui"and"Keyi", when following present Chinese textbooks to give lessons. In addition, grammar books related also have some limitations: the meaning items don't include all examples; the meaning given is not essential, just superficial; the generalization of terms of meaning is not systemic, and there lacks connection between them.On the basis of collecting amounts of lingual data, this thesis firstly combs out usages of"Neng""Hui"and"Keyi". It makes a detailed classification of"Neng"'s meaning, and explains the illegibility between two semantic items. Generally"Hui"is believed to express"possibility". In this paper, I give out my explanation with cognition theory, and describe its distributing sentence patterns and contexts. The affirmation and negation is not symmetrical in the word"Keyi", which deserves to pay attention. So we list its meaning items, the negations of which are accordingly discussed.After make a careful analysis of"Neng""Hui"and"Keyi", we discover they all have meanings of"ability"and"possibility". Therefore,"ability"and"possibility"are supposed to be two categories of semantics, expressed by modal verb"Neng""Hui"and"Keyi"in Chinese. We discuss their distributing characteristics and especially analyze their differences."Neng"symbolizes"restricted ability", while"Hui"expresses ability of keeping generic feature, and"Keyi"expresses ability of having maximum feature. When they denote possibility,"Hui"emphasizes particularly on possibility of subjective judgement, but"Neng"can express both objective and subjective possibility. However,"Neng"requires the following verb phrase having positive meaning, as which is positive itself. Conversely, the verb phrase existing after"Hui"and"Keyi"can be negative, which complements"Neng"in the semantic category of possibility.