Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

24 2. PERCEPTION VERBS AND THEIR COMPLEMENTS
and semantic variation than verbs referring to the other four sense
modalities (Cooper, 1973a,b). As examples, Cooper provides `Verb
+Particle' constructions (4), the ability of visual PVs to occur in
imperatives (5), and the ability of perception denoting nouns to occur
in Noun-Adjunct constructions (6).
(4) Look up the address. Cooper (1973b), 34
(5) Look at you, tracking mud all over my clean kitchen!
Cooper (1973b), 35
(6) The waitress is a good-looker. Cooper (1973b), 36
All three types of construction are frequent or at least grammatical for
vision expressions. For the other sense modalities, these constructions
are either less frequent or ungrammatical. Expressions for hearing
exhibit the highest degree of overlap with the syntactic and morphological
abilities of vision expressions, expressions for touch, smell, and
taste do so to a decreasing degree. Morphologically, expressions referring
to vision exhibit more a xed forms than non-vision sense referents.
For example, besides the noun sight, there is insight, foresight, and
hindsight, furthermore the adjective insightful and the adverb insightfully.
In Viberg's cross-linguistic data, vision is the sense modality
with the greatest degree of lexical elaboration (Viberg, 1984). Especially
for active visual perception, there is a large number of hyponyms
and the passive visual PV seems to be the only passive PV that has any
hyponyms at all. Cooper (1973a) explains the observed primacy of
the vision modality with the importance accorded to visual information
as our main source of information. Even in Australian languages,
which preferably derive verbs of cognition from hearing verbs and
not from vision verbs, vision verbs are the only perception verbs that
are never derived from another modality, i.e. vision is the unmarked
perceptual modality (Wilkins, 1996).
This study deals with experiencer based passive PVs like see for
two reasons. First, as opposed to active PVs, passive PVs in English
and other languages extend their meaning into the cognitive domain,
and second, passive PVs can embed all of the following complement
types (PVCs): naked in nitives, gerunds, nominalizations, in nitival
complement clauses, and tensed complement clauses with the complementizer
that. These PVCs are the topic of section 4. Active PVs in
English, which are experiencer based verbs like passive PVs, cannot
take in nitival complement clauses or tensed complement clauses with