Other: On Cognate Objects in Norwegian: An Empirical Approach

In this talk, I provide a corpus-based analysis of cognate objects in Norwegian. Cognate objects (COs) are noun phrases whose head noun is semantically and often morphologically related (i.e., ‘cognate’) to the verb (Faarlund et al. 1997:665), as illustrated in (1).

(1) Hun sov [en urolig søvn].
she slept a restless sleep
‘She slept a restless sleep.’

I address the following research questions, all of which form an important part of the previous research on COs (e.g., see Kuno & Takami 2004): In Norwegian, [i] which verbs can appear in cognate object constructions, [ii] are COs arguments or adjuncts, and [iii] do COs require modification? By collecting authentic language data from NoWaC, Norwegian Web as Corpus (Guevara 2010), I get to observe how COs and modifiers are used and to what extent (i.e., frequencies).

I claim that cognate objects in Norwegian [a] largely comply with the Unergative Restriction on the Cognate Object Construction, the main exception being "dø en død" ‘die a death’; [b] behave like direct objects, with which they share more syntactic properties compared to adverbials; and [c] that the modification requirement depends upon the verbs' valency.

Info

Day: 2021-11-18
Start time: 13:30
Duration: 00:30
Room: 🧉
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
Language: en

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