On the Syntactic Status of Cognate Objects

The syntactic status of cognate objects (COs) has attracted a lot of attention among researchers in the literature. As a first approximation, Jones (1988) and Moltmann (1989) advocate the adjunct analysis of COs, in which COs are regarded as an adjunct. On the contrary, Massam (1990) and Macfarland (1995) support the argument analysis of COs, in which COs are considered as an argument. At last, Kim & Lim (2012) favor the mixture of COs" properties. That is to say, COs exhibit both adjunct and argument properties in their analysis. In fact, both the adjunct and argument analysis are judged to be flawed because they restrict COs" properties to only one category. In addition, although the last analysis captures both the adjunct and argument characteristics of COs, it is still defective in that it fails to consider the vital role of COs" modification. Accordingly, I put forward my own proposal with the aim of capturing the exact status of COs. Specifically, I delve into COs" status on the basis of my distinction between the Cos with unaccusatives and those with unergatives.