Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

32 2. PERCEPTION VERBS AND THEIR COMPLEMENTS
touch. For the sense of smell and taste, the incoming sensory data
are received and projected in the limbic areas, while the information
obtained via vision, hearing and touch is rst projected in the
neo-cortex. The neo-cortex is, phylogenetically seen, the youngest part
of the cerebrum, which constitutes a proportionally larger part of the
human brain than of animal brains. The neo-cortex is the location of
most of the intellectual abilities which distinguish humans from other
beings. The visual and auditory areas in the cortex are located in
close proximity to the language area. Speci cally the left perisylvian
region of the cerebral cortex has been identi ed as the language `organ'
(Pinker, 1994). The left side of the human brain is also specialized
for hand control.
Possibly, the hemisphere that already contained computational
microcircuitry necessary for control of the ne,
deliberate, sequential manipulation of captive objects was
the most natural place in which to put language, which
also requires sequential control. Pinker (1994), 306
From a purely physiological point of view, vision and hearing
di er from the other sense modalities in three ways. First, they can
cover a much larger distance than touch, smell and taste. The
distance we can cover with our haptic sense is around 1 metre, with
our olfactory sense, several hundred metres. Our auditory sense allows
us to cover several kilometres, and our sense of vision almost inde -
nitely more (Zenner & Zrenner, 1994). Second, both vision and
hearing have the ability to focus on stimuli, e.g. by head or eye
movement. Our eyes have far greater abilities to focus than our ears.
Third, vision and hearing can analyse stimuli in great detail and
with high accuracy. So, with our eyes we can distinguish relative lightness,
a large variety of colours and shapes, movements, and obtain - to
a degree - three dimensional information (Zenner & Zrenner, 1994),
whereas our sense of taste mainly distinguishes between bitter, sweet,
sour, and salty (Hatt, 1990). 7 About 60 percent of all the information
our brain receives from the environment is taken in through our
eyes (Stieve & Wicke, 1990). This might help to explain why vision
ranks at the top of the lexicalization hierarchy of sense modalities
established by Viberg (1983) followed by hearing, touch, smell
and taste. This observation also supports the observation that vision
verbs are the ` rst' in the hierarchy to undergo semantic extension into
the cognitive domain
7 This generalization does not apply to the human sense of smell.