Step 4b – Analyzing Cognate Nominatives: Hifil Denominatives

In our search for cognate nominatives, there were five examples in which the verb was realized in the Hifil stem. We can search for these specifically with the following Hebrew construct:

 

Here are the results:

 

These all seem to be examples of denominal verbs—verbs that are derived from a noun. Remember that the Binyanim are primarily derivational rather than inflectional, meaning that their main function is to create new vocabulary. While Binyan generally interact with roots in predictable ways, it is not so simple as Hifil = causative. Both the Piel and Hifil stems are productive for forming denominatives.

For instance, פרס (Qal) is glossed “to divide s/t;” therefore, we may expect פרס (Hi) to be glossed “to cause s/o to divide s/t.”  In this case, however,  פרס (Hi) is a denominative of פרסה “(divided) hoof” and should be glossed as “to have (divided) hooves.”

In each of these cases, therefore, the cognate nominative is the base nominal from which the Hifil verb was derived. On closer inspection, however, I think that the examples from Lev 11:5 and 6 have been mis-tagged. Note that the verbs יַפְרִיס (Lev 11:5) and הִפְרִיסָה (Lev 11:6) agree with וְאֶת־הַשָּׁפָן “the rock badger (ms)” and וְאֶת־הָאַרְנֶבֶת “the hare (fs)” respectively rather than פַרְסָה “(divided) hoof (fs).” I suspect that these are actually cognate accusative constructions (cf. כֹּל מַפְרֶסֶת פַּרְסָה “all that have a divided hoof” in Lev 11:3). Likewise in Psa 80:10, ‏וַתַּשְׁרֵשׁ שָׁרָשֶׁיהָ , the fs verb agrees with the fs pronominal suffix whose antecedent is גֶּפֶן “vine” in verse 9 while שרש is mp in form. I think that this also is better analyzed as cognate accusative.

Step 4a – Analyzing Cognate Nominatives: Passive Clauses

A common behavior of the grammatical relation object is that an argument realized as an object in an active clause is promoted to subject in the comparable passive clause. My interest in the possibility of a cognate nominative was prompted by the question of whether cognate accusatives behaved as objects in this regard.

Our search for adjunct cognate accusatives returned a few hits in passive clauses. In these cases the cognate accusative is not promoted to subject, but remains a cognate accusative. Consider the following examples:

‏לֹא יִמָּכְרוּ מִמְכֶּרֶת עָבֶד

“They shall not be sold the sale of a slave” (Lev 25:42)

‏וְאִנָּקְמָה נְקַם־אַחַת מִשְּׁתֵי עֵינַי

“And I shall be avenged one vengeance for my two eyes” (Judg 16:28)

Our cognate nominative search also returned a few passive examples. We can search for these specifically by specifying the verbal stem in our Hebrew construct:

Here are a couple of the hits on this search:

‏וּפְקֻדַּת כָּל־הָאָדָם יִפָּקֵד עֲלֵיהֶם

“The fate of all humankind falls upon them” (Num 16:29)

‏ וּמִקְצָת יָמִים עֲשָׂרָה נִרְאָה מַרְאֵיהֶם טוֹב

“At the end of ten days their appearance appeared good…” (Dan 1:15)

In what way do these examples differ from the previous two cognate accusatives? The verb ראה selects a stimulus which is realized as object and promoted to subject under passivization. Compare this active clause:

‏וְאֶרְאֶה אֶת־הַמַּרְאֶה הַגָּדֹל הַזֶּה

“I saw this great vision” (Exod 3:3)

Therefore, Dan 1:15 seems to be following the typical behavior for objects under passivization with the cognate nominative מַרְאֵיהֶם filling the semantic role stimulus.

Num 16:29 is a little more complicated, but there are comparable examples of פקד governing an object accusative with a causative sense:

‏וּפָקַדְתִּי עֲלֵיהֶם חַטָּאתָם

“I will assign their sins onto them” ≅ “I will punish them for their sins” (Exod 32:34)

I think that Num 16:29 is analogous to this construction with פְקֻדַּת כָּל־הָאָדָם ‘the fate of all humankind’ filling the same semantic role as חַטָּאתָם ‘their sins’ (note also that it is the nature of חטא that produces the reading ‘punish’ for פקד, while Num 16:29 has a more neutral connotation). If this is the case, then this cognate nominative is also behaving like a typical object under passivization. In both of these cases the cognate nature of the argument seems incidental to the syntax.

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’.

Step 2a – Features of Cognate Accusatives: Noun Phrase Type

Now that we have a list of cognate accusatives (two lists actually) we can begin to develop some measures to further analyze the construction. The analytics window in Accordance shows a variety of patterns.

For instance, in our group of complements you’ll notice 13 particles. Those are the instances where the verb עלה is governing a prepositional phrase headed by על. The group of adjuncts has some similar cases that should be omitted.

You will also see that the group of complements can be divided between nouns in the absolute state and those in the construct:

At this point I have maximized what I can do with Accordance, so we will need to start tallying things by hand.[1] My first intuition is that we should look at two things: what types of noun phrases are showing up as cognate accusatives and with what semantic classes of verbs. In this post we will look at the former, the latter in the next.

Based on the analytics, the most obvious division is between bare indefinite noun phrases and noun phrases that are qualified in some manner (adjective, pronominal suffix, or in a construct relation).[2] For our complement cognate accusatives, there are about 80 bare indefinites and 90 qualified nouns. For the adjunct cognate accusatives I count roughly 25 bare indefinites and 15 qualified nouns. Overall it seems to be split rather evenly.

It is often assumed that the cognate accusative construction is used for manner modification. Biblical Hebrew (a root-pattern language) does not have a large set of derivational morphemes; therefore, to an English speaker it may seem like Biblical Hebrew has a shortage of adjectives and adverbs (I believe one of the teaching grammars uses this label).[3] More properly, the language simply expresses such concepts differently. For instance:

‏ וַיֶּחֱרַד יִצְחָק חֲרָדָה גְּדֹלָה

“Isaac trembled a great tremble” ≅ “Isaac trembled greatly”  (Gen 27:33)

In many cases, however, the qualifier does not add any adverbial nuance. Consider the following pair of sentences:

‏ וַיַּחֲלֹם יוֹסֵף חֲלוֹם

“Joseph dreamed a dream” (Gen 37:5)

‏וַיַּחֲלֹם עוֹד חֲלוֹם אַחֵר

“Joseph again dreamed another dream” (Gen 37:9)

Note how there is already an explicit adverbial—עוד—in the second verse. The adjective אחר seems to simply be an adjective here, specifying that it was a second dream.

Further, if manner modification is the function of cognate accusatives, what is the point of all those bare indefinites? It is often suggested that the bare indefinite cognate accusatives also have an “emphasizing” function. Thus:

 שָׁם פָּחֲדוּ פָחַד

“There they shall be in great terror” (Ps 14:5 NRSV, emphasis mine)

In general, I find this highly suspect. Consider these counter-examples in Genesis:

‏ וַיִּדַּר יַעֲקֹב נֶדֶר

“Jacob really (?) made a vow” (Gen 28:20)

‏ וַיִּזְבַּח יַעֲקֹב זֶבַח

“Jacob really (?) made a sacrifice” (Gen 31:54)

‏ וַיַּצֵּב יַעֲקֹב מַצֵּבָה

“Jacob really (?) erected a sacred stone” (Gen 35:14)

While cognate accusatives can leverage the relationship between verb and object in order to introduce manner modification, this does not seem to be a good explanation for the bulk of the examples. In the next post we will consider whether verbal semantics can help us.

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[1] In a perfect world, I would like to be able to dump the cognate accusatives from the previous search into a database and then tag each of them with several user defined parameters in order to cross-reference them, but Accordance is not that type of analytical tool. In a slightly less perfect world, I would like to run some sub-searches on the result set we produced with our previous search. Normally we could do this with the [CONTENTS ? ] command, but I realized there is a problem. CONTENTS returns a list of all verses that produced a hit, but the scope for a syntax search must be a chapter or book since it is possible for a syntactic unit to span two or more verses. We can use the analytics to get some broad analysis on the distribution.

[2] Conspicuously, the search returned no hits on nouns determined by the definite article. This seems to be a by-product of the way the [AGREE] command interacts with the syntax tags, namely it is not searching the entire complement phrase for roots that agree, but only the very first element in the phrase. For instance, the following verse did not produce a hit:

לִלְבֹּן הַלְּבֵנִים

“to ‘brick’ the bricks” (Exod 5:7)

Though it is syntactically analogous to this indefinite example:

נִלְבְּנָה לְבֵנִים

“Let’s ‘brick’ bricks” Gen 11:3

The grammars suggest that the typical “internal object” (look it up) is an indefinite cognate accusative. Were we doing a formal research project, we would obviously want to double check these definite examples to see if there is anything interesting going on.

[3] Of course, this line of thinking can lead to bad philosophical conclusions about differences between the Hebrew mind (i.e. they are concrete thinkers) and the Greek mind (capable of abstract thought). For instance, I recently had a man who had some seminary training (a while ago of course) try to argue with me that the “Hebrews” had no “concept of time”. I believe my face went into severe contortions and I began chanting the mantra James Barr… James Barr… James Barr…

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.

Step 1 – Searching for Cognate Accusatives

Our first step will be to learn a bit about the cognate accusative construction. Rather than start with the grammars, let’s try this inductively by creating an Accordance search. Begin by opening the HMT-W4 text (not BHS-W4) and link a Hebrew Construct. So, where is the tag for cognate accusative?

When the Syntax project was introduced, one of the loudest complaints was the omission of traditional grammatical labels such as subject, direct object, indirect object, and adverb. Long story short, these labels may be convenient, but they are pre-theoretical and not well-defined for a rigorous syntax. The goal of the syntax DB, therefore, was to be as theory neutral as possible with as few labels as possible.

There are two major distinctions:

At the clause level the subject is distinguished from the predicate:

‏אַתָּה תְּשׁוּפֶנּוּ עָקֵב
[S You ] [P will bruise him (on the) heel ]

At the phrase level complements are distinguished from adjuncts:

תְּשׁוּפֶנּוּ עָקֵב
[P will bruise [C him ] [A heel]]

In theory, this allows you to define your own grammatical relations by combining the syntax data with the morphological database. The complement of an active verb is roughly equivalent to the traditional object, the adjunct of a verb is adverbial, the adjunct of a noun is adjectival, etc.

So, our first search will look for all complements of a verb in which both verb and complement share the same root.

Remember that the Syntax DB is hierarchical in nature; therefore, it is a good practice to always build your searches top-down: clause > phrase > etc. You will also want to check “search both directions” for this example.

I have combined the syntax and morphology tags in order to specify that the head of the predicate phrase is a verb. I am not sure if this is the best practice, but the search did not work as expected otherwise.

I have specified that I only want the first—highest level—complement. This is also due to the hierarchical nature of the DB. I am only interested in the complement of the verb, but other elements (like prepositions) take complements which would produce hits if this box was left unchecked.

This search produces 390 hits. Here is a screenshot from the first page:

A quick browse suggests that everything is in order, but we will have to look at the data more closely later. In the next post we will expand our search to consider the cases in which an adjunct shares the same root with the verb. Should these also be grouped with our cognate accusatives? Should we distinguish a subset of cognate objects?

Is there a cognate nominative?

If you have studied Biblical Hebrew, then I am sure you are well aware of the cognate accusative construction. On the simple definition, a cognate accusative is an object phrase that shares the same (or a closely related) root as the verb. The phenomenon is much more complex and interesting, of course, but I did not spend much time thinking about cognate accusatives for my dissertation since they are typically indefinite and, therefore, not object marked. 

The other day I found myself wondering whether there was also a cognate nominative and what this may tell us about the nature of the grammatical relations subject and object and/or the accusative case. A quick search of the standard BH grammars came up empty, but then I thought that this may be an interesting research question for a test of the Hebrew Syntax module in Accordance. 

While I participated in tagging several of the books in the module, to this point I haven’t really tried my hand at any complicated searches. Indeed, while I am intimately familiar with the theoretical framework and terminology of the DB, I must confess that I have not found earlier versions of the search interface to be particularly intuitive.  

In this series of posts we’ll do a little summer research project and see where it leads.