Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Across languages, perception verbs (henceforth: PVs) belong to a
group of predicates that is able to take di erent types of complements.
These perception verb complements (henceforth: PVCs) basically have
two interpretations. Certain types of PVC are used to describe the
physical perception of some object or event. These complement types
express a direct physical relation to the environment.
(1) Jonathan saw a butter y.
(2) Jonathan watched his daughter climb onachair.
Other types of PVC are used to denote something mental, also termed
epistemic (Dretske, 1969), conceptual (Bolinger, 1974), indirect
(Kirsner & Thompson, 1976) or abstract (Monnich, 1992b). 1
(3) Jonathan saw that it was too late.
Leaving aside the perception of physical objects, I distinguish two
classes of ontological entities for the interpretation of natural language
(Vendler, 1967):
1. Events, processes, actions ! events
2. Propositions, facts, results ! propositions
For ease of reference, in the following the terms event and proposition
are used to refer to these two semantic types, which are explained
in more detail in chapter 3, section 1.2. PVCs that express events
are complements of PVs that express physical sense perception. PVCs
that express propositions have PV matrix predicates that semantically
extend into the cognitive domain. This cognitive extension of
passive PVs is assumed to be a universal in this study.
Generally, it has been claimed, that there is a one-to-one correlation
between PVC type and semantic type. More speci cally, aPVCtype
denotes either events or propositions. However, as PVCs, English
1 Note that this listing is not exhaustive.
1