Nguyen, Anne and Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine, 2019.
“Ingredients of excess: A study of Vietnamese quá.”
Poster presented at SALT 29.
We study the uses of the Vietnamese excessive morpheme quá, which is unusual in being able to precede or follow a gradable predicate, unlike other degree morphemes. Excessives canonically express that the degree of a gradable predicate is greater than what is compatible with a purpose (Meier 2003), but have also been described as introducing a malefactive inference. We that the pre- and post-predicate uses of quá encode these two different components of excessive meaning: one is a purpose-oriented excessive construction, whereas the other is a comparative which encodes a not-at-issue malefactive inference. We also survey additional uses of the morpheme(s) quá in Vietnamese.