The present paper studies two approaches to the expressiveness of propositional modal logics based on first-degree entailment logic, FDE. We first consider the basic FDE-based modal logic BK and certain systems in its vicinity, and then turn to some FDE-based modal logics in a richer vocabulary, including modal bilattice logic, MBL. On the one hand, model-theoretic proofs of the definability of connectives along the lines of [McCullough, “Logical connectives for intuitionistic propositional logic”, Journal of Symbolic Logic 36, 1 (1971): 15–20. DOI: 10.2307/2271511] and [[17] Wansing, “Logical connectives for constructive modal logic”, Synthese 150, 3 (2006): 459–482. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-005-5518-5] are given for various FDE-based modal logics. On the other hand, building on [Odintsov and Wansing, “Disentangling FDE-based paraconsistent modal logics, Studia Logica 105, 6 (2017): 1221–1254. DOI: 10.1007/s11225-017-9753-9], expressibility is considered in terms of mutual faithful embeddability of one logic into another logic. A distinction is drawn between definitional equivalence, which is defined with respect to a pair of structural translations between two languages, and weak definitional equivalence, which is defined with respect to a weaker notion of translations. Moreover, the definitional equivalence of some FDE-based modal logics is proven, especially the definitional equivalence of MBL and a conservative extension of the logic BK□×BK□, which underlines the central role played by BK among FDE-based modal logics
