Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

138 5. PERCEPTION VERB COMPLEMENTS IN AKATEK
The catalogue of structural and semantic criteria used in chapter 3
for the characterization of PVCs in English is modi ed in the following
way. Since there is no case marking on NPs in Akatek, this criterion
is irrelevant for a description of Akatek PVCs. Solely the agreement
marking on the verb can be employed as a criterion. In addition to tense
and aspect, morphological markers of aktionsart as described in chapter
4 are taken into consideration. The distinction between adverbials
and adjectives is problematic. The results of cross-linguistic investigations
on nominalizations indicate that many languages either completely
lack a distinction between adjectives and adverbs or have only
a minimal one. As a result, the distribution of adverbs and adjectives
in terms of complement types is highly dependent on the speci c syntactic
structures of the language in question (Koptjevskaja-Tamm,
1993; Hamm, 1996). In Akatek, the distinction between adverbs and
adjectives is di cult to draw inmany cases. Due to the fact that this
distinction is in general highly language speci c, it is excluded from the
catalogue of criteria. Since there is a rich system of non-active voices in
Akatek, antipassive constructions are added. The above changes result
in the revised list of criteria for the description of Akatek PVCs shown
in Table 2.
Table 2. Criteria for the structural and semantic characterization
of Akatek PVCs
Criteria for a structural Criteria for a semantic
characterization characterization
Constituency Temporal simultaneity
Complementizer Perceptibility
Agreement marking Process vs. state predicates
Tense/Aspect/Aktionsart Sentential negation
Determiners/Pluralization Sentential adverbs
Anti-/ Passivization Modal auxiliaries
Cleft Semantic value of COMP
Variety of Matrix predicates
The topic of the following section is the lexicalization of PVs in
Akatek. The purpose of this section is to familiarize the reader with
the PVs that serve as matrix predicates for the two types of PVC,
which are characterized in sections 3 and 4, respectively.