In Korean linguistics research, imperatives, propositives, and promissives are considered intentional modal expressions. As an attempt to prove the hypothesis that imperatives, propositives, and promissives are universally intentional modal expressions, we investigate mood conversion phenomena in Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese, concentrating on imperatives, propositives, and promissives. We find that the three languages express intentional modality by clause final grammatical elements, whose syntactic categories are modal(M) in Chinese and Vietnamese, and complementizer(C) in Korean. We also find that the three languages have special conjunctive constructions which require the consequent clause to be intentional modal expressions, i.e., intentional constructions. We suggest formal semantic characterizations for the three subtypes of intentional constructions based on Kratzer’s(1981, 1991) theory of modality.
