Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

2. TYPOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS 123
the other hand, is a deictic strategy, itprovides reference as to which
noun phrase obtains which grammatical role. Cross-linguistically, it
turns out that agreement indexes the important or salient arguments,
i.e. subject and objects, whereas case marking indicates non-obvious
grammatical relationships. The cross-linguistic distribution of agreement
and case marking is distributed along the upper part of the accessibility
hierarchy established by Keenan & Comrie (1977) for the
relative accessibility of NPs to relativization:
(80) Accessibility Hierarchy (AH) (Keenan & Comrie, 1977)
S > DO > IO > OBL > GEN > O of Comparison
The AH expresses the observation that subjects (S) are more accessible
to relativization than (>) direct objects (DO), which in turn are more
accessible than indirect objects (IO) and so on. The AH is speci ed by
the following constraints (Keenan & Comrie, 1977):
1. A language must be able to relativize subjects.
2. Any relative clause-forming strategy must apply to a continuous
segment of the AH.
3. Strategies that apply at one point of the AH may in principle
cease to apply at any lower point.
Regarding the distribution of agreement marking, Table 7 illustrates
that agreement marking is realized across languages from subject
via direct object and indirect object/oblique to benefactive. A language
Table 7. Presence of agreement marking (after Croft (1988))
S DO IO/ OBL BEN Languages
{ { { { Chrau, Chinese
+ { { { English, Turkish
+ + { { Quiche
+ + + { Abkhaz, Manam
+ + + + Kinyarwanda
(+ = agreement, { = no agreement)
that shows agreement for all these categories is Kinyarwanda. At the
other end of the scale there are languages like Chinese, where none of
the categories is referred to by agreement marking. The Mayan language
Quiche takes a middle position in that subject and object have
agreement markers while indirect object/oblique and benefactive do
not. In other words, if a language has agreement marking at all, it has
at least agreement marking for the subject.