A Syntactic Analysis of Cognate Accusative in Arabic with Reference to English

Abstract

This study aims at clarifying the construction of Arabic cognate Accusative and its realization in English in order to be clearer for the learners who try to understand the structure of the Arabic clause. The study attempts to investigate the verbs that take cognate accusative. It is hypothesized that Arabic learners are not aware of this phenomenon, thus they face difficulties in translating them into English because of the complex forms of cognate accusative. To investigate the hypothesis of this research, different Arabic examples were taken from the authentic books and compare these data with their counterpart in English in order to show the differences and similarities between the two different languages and analyze these data from a syntactic point of view which adopts Langacker’s (1991) framework of cognitive grammar.  The study is to be empirical, analytical, and comparative. The researchers use Arabic data from different books and look for the equivalent structures of English so that they give a clear idea about this syntactic phenomenon. The results of the study show that Arabic construction has more uses of cognitive Accusative than English.