Marking Trustworthiness with Near Synonyms: A Corpus-based Study of “Renwei” and “Yiwei” in Chinese

We conducted a corpus-based study on near synonymous cognitive verbs “renwei 認為” and “yiwei 以為” with a similar meaning of “to think” in Chinese. The motivation of this study is that information trustworthiness in propositions var-ies with the use of “renwei” or “yiwei”, which concerns the issue of speakers’ stances or atti-tudes. We examined the epistemic modality at-tributed to “renwei” and “yiwei” in written discourse, by testing their different functions of evidential marking, negative forms and hedging device. Results showed that “renwei” was asso-ciated with specialized and professional subjects and consequently demonstrated its relatively high degree of evidentiality. Then, specific neg-ative polarity shifters exclusively collocating with “yiwei” denoted larger scope of negation of entire propositions. Lastly, only “renwei” func-tioned as a hedge to mitigate claims lacking full commitment in the political discourse. Therefore, the evidence of data proved that the epistemic marker “renwei” was associated with a higher degree of information trustworthiness, contrib-uting to the annotation system in NLP for the de-tection of information credibility.