The emphatic and expressive properties of the Japanese expression hodo-ga aru ‘there is a limit’

Abstract

The Japanese expression hodo-ga aru literally means ‘there is a limit’.
However, when it co-occurs with a gradable predicate, it conveys an extreme degree accompanied by negative emotion. In this paper, I show that the intensifier use of hodo-ga aru has been conventionalized based on corpus data and a questionnaire survey. I then argue, based on the analysis of Sawada (To appear), that hodo-ga aru constitutes a special type of mixed content (McCready 2010; Gutzmann 2011) in that (i) it semantically denotes that the target x exceeds the maximum permissible limit, under the presupposition that x already meets a contextual standard, and (ii) it conventionally implies that the speaker holds a negative evaluation of x. In the second half of the paper, I compare the intensifier hodo-ga aru with the excessive marker sugiru ‘too’ and wh-exclamatives, and clarify their similarities and differences. This paper proposes a new type of excessive expression in natural language: an emotive excessive expression.