Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

26 2. PERCEPTION VERBS AND THEIR COMPLEMENTS
Kobon (Papua), Vietnamese, and Chinese there is only one verb for
passive perception, and that does not have a prototypical meaning of
vision, but expresses general sense perception. Both Vietnamese and
Chinese have distinct active PVs for each sense modality. In order
to achieve the passive perception reading, the verb for general sense
perception is added to the active PV. In other words, both languages
use serial verb constructions to distinguish for example passive `see'
from passive `hear', while the only simple verb lexicalized for passive
perception is unspeci ed for any sense modality. Viberg (1983, 1984)
explicitly focused on lexicalization patterns of the ve sense modalities
without including the possibility of additional lexicalizations for
general sense perception. However, he notes that few languages with
speci c lexical items for the sense modalities have an additional general
sense PV. If this observation bears closer examination, English would
be among the few languages having verbs both for speci ed and unspeci
ed sense perception, i.e. sense and perceive. German also has a verb
for general passive sense perception, wahrnehmen `perceive'. However,
the lexical eld of basic perception in German is more intricate than
in English. In addition to the touch PV fuhlen `feel' there is a second
PV, emp nden, which is close to fuhlen in that both can express
the sense modality oftouch or general sense perception. Similarly,
spuren `sense' can express general sense perception but also has the
tactile interpretation `feel'. There seems to be a connection between
lexicalizations for touch and expressions for general sense perception.
Findings regarding the historical development of lexicalization patterns
for the sense modalities are provided in section 3.3.
As a solution in terms of the hierarchy, I limit the investigation to
lexical items for the ve sense modalities, and only if no speci c verb
for any of the modalities is lexicalized, like e.g. in Kobon (see Viberg
(1984), p. 150), then I resort to the general verb for perception. In
other words, the general verbs for perception in English and German
are outside the scope of the investigation because both languages exhibit
a complete lexicalization of the hierarchy, i.e. a distinct passive
PV for each sense modality.
The third exception Viberg (1983) notes is Seneca, an Iroquoian
language. In Seneca, passive PVs for vision, hearing, smell/taste
are lexicalized, but not for touch, so that hierarchy (7) does not work
here. Due to the under-representation of American Indian languages
in Viberg's sample, however, he assumes that this pattern is not uncommon,
so that for the time being, the ranking of touch, smell and
taste within the hierarchy is unclear (Viberg, 1983).