Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

114 4. AKATEK, A `TYPICAL' MAYAN LANGUAGE
are exible VXY languages. Thus, VSO languages present the majority
ofverb-initial languages with 77.4%. Only 15.1% of the verb-initial
languages are VOS, and the remaining 7.5% are VXY as illustrated in
Table 5.
Table 5. Frequency of V-initial languages in Hawkins (1983)
Word order No. of languages % of total % of V-initial
VSO 41 12.2 77.4
VOS 8 2.4 15.1
VXY 4 1.2 7.5
Total V-initial 53 15.8 100
Total sample 336 100
Historically, Proto-Mayan word order (Norman & Campbell,
1978; England, 1991) was VOS with preverbal positions for topic
and cleft and a postverbal position for reordered objects, which had to
be marked (i.e. complex, animate or de nite):
(58) a. TOPIC CLEFT [VOS]
b. TOPIC CLEFT [VS] reordered-O
The historical reconstruction above allows to derive all non-basic argument
orders that occur in Mayan languages: Topicalization and clefting
processes render OSV, SOV, SVO, and OVS, while reordering of the O
generates VSO.
In the following I present evidence in favor of the claim that lexical
arguments are avoided. First of all, besides the generally low number
of transitives with two lexical NPs in all Mayan languages, languages
with a exible word order restrict the co-occurrence of two lexical NPs
even more. Second, if one NP is lexically instantiated, xed word order
languages prefer the argument which is next to the verb within the word
order pattern over the nal argument in the order pattern. The results
of Schule (1996) as presented in Table 6 indicate that in a xed VSO
language VS constructions are preferred over VO constructions.
Table 6 shows that in narrative texts of the xed word order languages
Jakaltek and San Mateo Chuj, the frequency of transitive clauses
with third person subject and object NPs is a mere 18.1% for Jakaltek
and 18.6% for San Mateo Chuj while in the exible word order language
Akatek this number dwindles down to 4.2 %. Looking at the internal
distribution of cases where in transitive constructions with third person
subject and object only one argument is lexically expressed, in
the VSO language Jakaltek a tendency for subject NP encoding was