Cognate Object Constructions in English

"Cognate Object Constructions in English…" is the first comprehensive description of linguistic expressions such as Both died an unheroic death or Jamie grinned his tired grin, viewed from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. Redefining the category of "cognate objects", the book provides a systematic account of prototypical and less prototypical instances of this pattern. Based on real-usage data from the BNC, the study presents a family of constructions which are equipped with their own syntactic and lexical idiosyncrasies and their own semantic-pragmatic functions, such as event structuring and event intensification. In a step-by-step fashion, the author develops a network of constructional schemas ranging from abstract to concrete, thereby investigating and corroborating the plausibility of a lexis-syntax continuum - one of the main assumptions of the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise.

The book offers important insight on concepts such as argument structure and transitivity and demonstrates the fruitful interrelationship between Cognitive Linguistics and statistical corpus linguistics.