Cognate Object

I remember that when I first encountered the expression “live a good life” more than ten years ago, I felt a little uncomfortable about it and wondered why they repeat the words with the same meaning. Since then, I have seen many variations, but never knew exactly what they were.

These objects are called “cognate¹ object” and seem to be present in many languages. In English, there are many examples² of this. Some expressions are not commonly used, such as “dream a dream”.

For me, as a Japanese, “sing a song” and “dance a dance” are totally understandable, probably because in Japanese we have almost the same expressions, 歌を歌う (sing a song) and 踊りを踊る (dance a dance) (these are called 同族目的語³ in Japanese, see also 重言⁴) However, “die a death” sounds particularly strange, because the Japanese word for die never has any noun as its object.