Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

220 5. PERCEPTION VERB COMPLEMENTS IN AKATEK
the complementizer tol have been analyzed as subjunctive complements
(SUBs). The case or agreement marking of these complement types
does not di er from the marking of independent sentences. Both take
optional complementizers and allow tense-aspect marking. This clausal
complementtype allows neither pluralization nor modi cation with determiners.
Semantically,type1 PVCs in Akatek as well as that-PVCs in
English are proposition denoting. They permit negation and modality
and are unrestricted regarding temporal simultaneity, the perceptibility
of the complement predicate and whether it has to be a state or
a process predicate. Both PVC types can alternatively be embedded
by cognitive verbs like Akatek ootaj `know' or English know and by
verbs of communication like Akatek al `say' or English mention as well
as by non-verbal predicates like Akatek watx' `be good' or English be
a fact.
5. Conclusion
In this chapter, I have presented a description of PVC types in
Akatek. As a prerequisite, I investigated the lexicalization of PVs.
Akatek has two basic PVs, il `see' and ab' `hear', which have active
as well as passive interpretations. In conformity with the lexicalization
hierarchy for verbs of perception (see chapter 2), ab' `hear' is also used
to cover the lower sense modalities of touch, taste, and smell. Both
il `see' and ab' `hear' extend their meaning into the cognitive domain.
This is a precondition for the occurrence of proposition denoting
PVC types in a language.
Akatek has two di erent types of PVC, referred to as type1 and
type2. This con rms part of Hypothesis I: languages with a complementation
system use at least two di erent types of PVC. Type1 PVCs
occur in two varieties, as INDs or as SUBs, which only di er in the
complementizers they take. The structural and semantic description of
type1 and type2 PVCs in Akatek according to the criteria established
for the analysis of English PVC types in chapter 3 con rmed Hypothesis
II: at least one PVC type is exclusively event denoting, as well as
Hypothesis III: PVC types that are primarily proposition denoting
can under special conditions also be event denoting. These results
con rm the second part of Hypothesis I: one of the two PVCtypes
is used to express events and one to denote propositions. Iwas
also able to con rm Hypothesis IV: the ability tobeembedded by the
matrix predicate `know' distinguishes the exclusively event denoting
PVCs from the primarily proposition denoting ones. As illustrated
in Table 16, the proposition denoting type1 PVCs can be embedded