Cognate objects in Chinese

It has been observed that in English while unergative verbs can take cognate subjects, transitive verbs or unaccusative verbs cannot (Massam 1990). However, in Chinese, not only can intransitives take cognate objects, transitives can also take cognate objects. Furthermore, when a transitive takes a cognate object and another object, the two objects may be freely ordered, depending on the forms of the two objects, i.e., whether the cognate object is a reduplicated form of the verbs and whether the other object NP is a pronoun. In this paper I examine the ordering between the cognate object and the other object in the double object construction. I propose a scrambling process, clitic status of the object pronoun, and lexical statut of a reduplicated cognate object, to explain the different ordering in the double object construction