Step 3 – Finding Cognate Nominatives

So, now that we have done a brief overview of the cognate accusative, is there a cognate nominative? On the most basic definition—a nominative that shares the same root with the verb—yes. [1] The [AGREE] command only works below the same level of hierarchy (phrase, clause, etc). Because the subject is at the clause level while the verb is nested within the predicate phrase we will not be able to take full advantage of the syntax DB beyond the fact that we have NPs tagged as subjects. This is the search I devised to find cognate nominatives:

This resulted in 103 hits, but some of these are garbage (a few involving Ketib-Qere; Robert it seems that the syntax tag of the previous element is bleeding over into the member of the Ketib-Qere pair that we left unmarked; is this the way it was expected to work?). There are also some puns on names that I am not interested in. Paring the set down, I come up with about 35 examples of cognate nominatives. Here is a screen shot of the first few results:

I can make a few brief observations on the results. About 20 are bare indefinites while 15 are qualified in some manner—a similar distribution to our cognate accusatives. Overwhelmingly the phenomenon was found in formally intransitive clauses which may or may not be significant. There are four cases involving Nifal stems and five involving Hifil stems that may merit further comment.

Note that this search did not produce hits for phrases such as ‏וּבְכָל־הָרֶמֶשׂ הָרֹמֵשׂ עַל־הָאָרֶץ “and over all the creepers that creep on the earth” (Gen 1:26). In this case, הָרֶמֶשׂ is not properly the subject of רֹמֵשׂ due to the relative clause structure, but I suspect the construction may be relevant or at least interesting in its own right.

So technically there are cognate nominatives. The omission of such a category from the grammars suggests that nobody has found anything particularly interesting about this construction that merits further discussion, but I’m sure we can find something to talk about.
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[1] The label nominative is borrowed by the grammars from the classical Greek tradition for convenience, but Biblical Hebrew, of course, does not have an inflectional case system. Therefore, technically, we are searching for cognate subjects here since all the zero-coded non-subjects are usually grouped with ‘accusatives’.

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Tags: Accordance, Biblical Hebrew, Cognate Nominative, Transitivity

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