Step 1b – Adverbial Cognate Accusatives?
In the last post we did a search for complements which shared the same root as the verb. Before we analyze these results, we should do a second search to check for a similar situation with adjuncts.
If you saved the previous Hebrew Construct, simply exchange the complement phrase with an adjunct phrase.
Indeed, this search gives us another 159 hits.
If you browse these results, you’ll notice that many of the hits are infinitive absolutes. The other category of examples seem to be cases where a cognate accusative co-occurs with a direct object as in Exodus 12:14:
וְחַגֹּתֶם אֹתוֹ חַג לַיהוָה
“You shall celebrate it (as a) feast to YHWH”
Why are these considered adjuncts instead of complements, or why are the previous examples considered complements instead of adjuncts? Would the similar cognate accusative in this hypothetical sentence be analyzed as a complement:
וְחַגֹּתֶם חַג לַיהוָה
“You shall celebrate a feast to YHWH”
I am not precisely sure, but my intuition is that this question may need to be revisited. Cognate accusatives, of course, are one of the categories that present problems for the traditional label object, but we will worry about that later.
Our next step will be to develop some measures and criteria to analyze the distribution of this construction as we attempt to draw some conclusions about its function.
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