@@ This paper presents two types of deontic modals in Hakka dialect, a high TET and a low TET, in determining a fine-grained modal structure. Either the low TET or the high TET can express the permission reading. However, as the former, TET follows the verb and takes an object as in (1a); as the latter, TET combines with a light verb zo, originated as ‘do’ and takes the VP as its complement in (1b). The proposed syntactic structures and derivations of the two types of TET are illustrated in (2): the high TET is merged above the vP, while the low TET occurs between the vP and the VP followed by a verb movement. One way to justify this syntactic hierarchy comes from the placement of the adverb: the high TET in zotet in (3) can scope over the adverb, whereas the low TET in (4) must stay inside scope.