Cognate objects and the argument/adjunct distinction in English.

摘要

Current linguistic theories and applications built thereon make a distinction between noun phrases which are arguments and those which are non-arguments (adjuncts). This dissertation studies syntactic, semantic, and aspectual criteria underlying the argument/adjunct distinction in the context of the cognate object construction in English (e.g., She laughed a happy laugh). The argument status of the cognate noun in this construction has been disputed; however, analysis of a corpus of naturally occurring tokens determines that the cognate object is an argument of its verb.;The cognate object construction is defined as involving verb-noun pairs which share a root morpheme (e.g., laugh/laugh, sing/song, die/death); furthermore, the verb must have a creation verb interpretation, and the noun a result object interpretation. In the literature, it has been proposed that the cognate object is an event argument, quasi-argument, or adjunct. However, examples from the corpus reveal that, with respect to standard argument diagnostics, wh-movement, topicalization, pronominalization, definiteness, and especially passivization, the cognate object behaves like a true argument of its verb. It is argued that the argument status of the cognate object arises from the aspectual characteristics of the construction: because the cognate object delimits and measures out the event denoted by the verb, it is a measure argument, the verb's direct internal argument.;The claim that the cognate object is an argument of its verb is challenged by the frequent occurrence of the unaccusative verb die in the cognate object construction. A comparison of the near synonyms perish and die establishes that, while perish is unaccusative, an unergative classification of die not only justifies its occurrence in the cognate object construction, but also better accounts for the verb's behavior with respect to unaccusativity diagnostics.;Finally, the semantic, aspectual, and syntactic properties of verbs which can occur in the cognate object construction are laid out. The insight of this corpus-based study of the cognate object construction is that the argument status of the cognate object is not the semantic concept of result object, but the aspectual concept of measure argument.