Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

14 1. INTRODUCTION
Partial typology has not been left without critique. By looking at
an isolated `part' of language, little is to be gained regarding the interrelationship
of the construction under investigation with other `parts'
of the language (Hawkins, 1986). Supporting Hawkins' critique, Shibatani
& Bynon (1995) note that a mere collection of generalizations
of individual features of languages does not necessarily result in
a deeper understanding of language. They suggest that
to be more e ective, partial typology must organize its
domains of investigation into an interrelated network so
that possible hierarchical structuring of the domains may
emerge. Shibatani & Bynon (1995), 16
The di culty of identifying one of several constructions as the basic
one as well as the desire to correlate co-occurences of the domains
investigated in partial typology paved the ground for a yet di erent
approach totypology, namely comparative typology.
The obvious limitations of partial typology caused some linguists
to revert to more traditional approaches and to start doing what is
referred to as comparative typology. Comparative typology adopts the
view of holistic typology, which treats language as an `organic' whole
and therefore aims at comparing the overall grammatical structures
of two or more languages. However, in contrast to holistic typology,
only a small number of languages but a large number of properties
are investigated and compared. Examples are the comparative typology
of English and German by Hawkins (1986) or of English and
Australian languages by Hale (1983). The goal of comparative typology
is to identify underlying principles of the contrastive features
found among the languages investigated. This is based on the assumption
that linguistic properties are connected in a hierarchical manner,
i.e. one property is responsible for the cooccurrence of other properties.
Thus, the focus shifted from the hierarchical organization of
cross-linguistic patterns of individual constructions to the hierarchical
organization of properties within single languages.
In sum, three main approaches to language typology have been
identi ed. They basically di er in the number of languages and the
number of features under investigation. Whereas in holistic typology,
languages are seen as organic wholes and the goal is to classify them
by reverting to only a few charcteristics, the goal of partial typology is
to generate implicative correlations between single features. In partial
typology, the investigation is limited to single grammatical phenomena
like e.g. relative clauses, but the predictions made on the basis of the
established hierarchical ordering of the variety of structures is claimed