Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

8 1. INTRODUCTION
visual input. Confusion between the truth implication of a visual perception
expression, i.e. what we see, and the utterance implication,
i.e. what we saywe see, arises especially in rst person reports in the
present tense. Therefore, the following investigation of PVCs concentrates
an third person reports in the past tense. The observations made
with respect to our visual ability also apply to our senses of hearing
and touch, but less to our senses of smell and taste. In chapter 2 the
lexicalization and the cognitive extension of PVs across languages and
the di erent PVCtypes that occur are discussed.
2. Typology
The central goals of typological researchhave been traditionally the
classi cation of the world's languages as presented in section 2.1 and
more recently the investigation of cross-linguistic patterns, which is
the topic of section 2.2. Central to the investigation of cross-linguistic
patterns are the notion of a linguistic type and the method of crosslinguistic
comparison. The identi cation of correlative grammatical
properties by means of cross-linguistic comparison allows to de ne
linguistic types. The investigation of cross-linguistic patterns is approached
from three di erent perspectives referred to as holistic, partial
and comparative typology. These approaches are presented in section
2.3.
2.1. Typological Classi cation. For the typological classi cation
of the world's languages, the entire range of variation across languages
has to be ascertained, i.e. theoretically possible structural types
must be de ned. Once this is done, each language is classi ed as one of
the established types. The variation of grammatical mechanisms used
to relate linguistic concepts to each other is highly restricted across
languages. This observation constitutes the starting point for the classical
typological classi cation of languages into isolating, agglutinative,
in ectional and incorporating types. The di erent techniques for
encoding relational meaning, i.e. the relation of lexical concepts to
each other, were successively identi ed by Friedrich and August von
Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt and August Schleicher. 3
The isolating language type is characterized by a complete absence
of a xes. Agglutinative languages use a xes that denote
single grammatical categories such asnumber and concatenate the afxes
without phonological changes. Inflectional languages, also
referred to as exional or fusional, are characterized by multifunctional
3 For a detailed historical discussion refer to chapter 3 of Greenberg (1974).