Vietnamese transitive cognate objects revisited

Abstract A cognate object construction (COC) is a construction in which a typically intransitive verb combines with a nominal phrase that has the same meaning or the same morphological stem, e.g., live a happy life . In the literature, the syntactic status of cognate objects (CO) is one of the most debated issues. Pham (1999) observes that in Vietnamese, COs can occur with transitive verbs in both the direct object and indirect object position. She concludes that examples of direct COs provide evidence for the view that COs are arguments, and the existence of indirect COs shows that they can also be indirect objects. First, this paper argues that direct COs cannot be treated as evidence for the argument status of COs since they are not additional arguments. Moreover, they are not nouns but classifiers. Second, indirect COs are not indirect objects but prepositional objects in an adverbial prepositional phrase. These findings reveal that Vietnamese transitive COs are complex and different from the description in Pham’s study. It is important to make a clear distinction between these transitive COs and intransitive COs, especially in cross-linguistic research.