Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

16 1. INTRODUCTION
biased by the hypothesis of the researcher. The use of sources that
already rely on secondary sources should be avoided altogether since
they potentially introduce or perpetuate errors or misreadings of the
original. A typical example of a misreading is the following: Givon
(1995) uses Sacapultec (Maya) to support `the VSO-language argument'
while in the source, DuBois (1987) notes that Sacapultec is a
VOS language, which is in accordance with the fact that other members
of the same branch in the Mayan family of languages are also either
VOS or VOS/VSO exible (Dayley, 1981; England, 1991; Quizar,
1979).
Detailed analyses of PVCs are rare in secondary sources, so that I
decided to investigate PVCs in one language, Akatek (Maya), in detail
and to embed the obtained results into a broader typological perspective.
I used data obtained from three di erent sources: from a grammar,
from text collections and from elicitation. The grammar of Akatek
o ers a wealth of examples, many taken from texts, and is kept fairly
descriptive(Zavala, 1992b). The second source of data is a published
bilingual text collection (Penalosa & Say, 1992) along with texts of
a native speaker (Franco, 1993). These texts, folk tales and personal
narratives, were recorded, transcribed and edited with the help of the
author. 9 The third type of data was collected during interviews with
two native speakers concentrating on the elicitation of grammaticality
judgments and translations during a one-month eld trip. All Akatek
data in this thesis are from my eld notes unless indicated otherwise.
4. Methodology
In this thesis, I adhere to a combination of partial and comparative
typology. On one hand, the investigation focuses on one speci c
construction type, namely perception verb complements (PVCs). On
the other hand, emphasis is given to the detailed description of one
language, Akatek, and its comparison with English, which has been
described in considerable detail. In addition, basic typological characteristics
of Akatek such asword order are compared to English in
order to investigate whether there are any correlations between traditional
typological features and PVCs. The results of the description of
the PVC systems of Akatek and English are embedded within the typological
system of general complementation established by Noonan
9 The texts of Roberto Franco were collected and interlinearized in 1993 at the
University of Oregon by myself and other students, who also generously shared
their interlinearized versions of large parts of Penalosa & Say (1992) with me.