Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

3. TYPES OF MEANING EXTENSION 29
(Huffman (1970), Anne Holzapfel (p.c.)). 5 An additional argument
for a primacy of the hearing modality instead of the primacy
of vision is provided by studies of morphologically distinct sensory
evidentials, which lexicalize along the following (tentative) hierarchy
(Anderson, 1986):
(8) hearing > non-vision sensory > vision
Evidentials indicate the kind of evidence available to the speaker for
making a claim, e.g. sensory evidentials indicate whether the information
was obtained by visual, non-visual sensory, or auditory means.
Haptic, gustatory or olfactory sources of information are cross-linguistically
subsumed within a non-visual sensory evidential marker (Anderson,
1986). Evidentials also play a role in the interpretation of perception
verb complements, which will be explored in section 4.1 and
in chapter 6. In other words, regarding the lexicalization of morphological
evidentials, hearing has primacy over vision, and vision and
hearing are lexicalized as distinct evidential markers as opposed to
the three other sense modalities.
At this point, vision and hearing PVs appear to be in competition
with respect to serving as the main source for cognitive extensions.
The main division within the sense modality hierarchy has been drawn
between vision, hearing and touch on the one hand and smell
and taste on the other - and not between vision and hearing vs.
touch, smell, and taste. Di erences in behaviour of the individual
PVs re ect the ordering in the hierarchy. Thus, in English, tensed
complements of PVs in the upper part of the hierarchy, i.e. see, hear,
and feel, can occur without the complementizer that as shown in (9),
which is not possible for complements of PVs of the lower part of the
hierarchy, i.e. smell and taste as illustrated by the ungrammaticality
of the bracketing in example (10) (Caplan, 1973).
(9) a. John saw/heard/felt (that) Mary would run to the store.
Caplan (1973), 274
b. John saw/heard/felt (that) the dinner was already cooked.
(10) a. John smelled *?(that) the dinner was already cooked.
Caplan (1973), 274
b. John tasted *?(that) the pudding was already sweet.
Caplan (1973), 274
5 For details see also chapter 6, section 3.4.