Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

40 2. PERCEPTION VERBS AND THEIR COMPLEMENTS
that are morphologically restricted to dependent sentences, which are
still marked like verbs in independent sentences. The latter is a case
of so-called independent mood occurring e.g. in West Greenlandic. Finally,
in languages where verbs are not in ected for any parameter or
always only for a single one, e.g. aspect, the opposition between nite
and non- nite cannot be established at all. This is the case in most
isolating languages, e.g. in Chinese.
As an alternative to the notion of niteness, Cristofaro (1998)
suggests a combination of Stassen's balancing and deranking strategies
(Stassen, 1985) and Haspelmath's dependent and independent verb
forms (Haspelmath, 1995). A verb form is de ned as dependent, if it
cannot occur in an independent declarative clause, no matter by what
means this is indicated. 9 In other words, while independent clauses can
by de nition only contain independentverb forms, complement clauses
can contain either independent or dependent verb forms. The main
strategies for marking the dependent status of a verb form are:
1. reduction of verbal morphology
2. special morphemes
3. indications of category change like exhibition of nominal or adjectival
features (Cristofaro, 1998)
Cristofaro (1998) analyzed the cross-linguistic distribution of dependent
and independent complements occurring with di erent matrix
predicate classes. Her total sample consisted of 81 languages. I used
the results of her study to investigate the distribution of dependent
(D) and independent (I) PVCs. All the logically possible combinations
of D, I and D/I are presented in Table 5. According to Cristofaro
(p.c.), cases in which perception verbs function as knowledge predicates
were subsumed under knowledge predicates. Regarding PVCs
this means that event denoting PVCs are perception predicate complements
in her study, and proposition denoting PVCs are among the
complements of knowledge predicates. I presuppose the extension of
PVs into the cognitive domain to be a universal, so that I assume that
proposition denoting PVC types are among the complementtypes of
knowledge matrix predicates of her study. Since not for all languages in
Cristofaro's sample su cient information was available for complement
types of both perception and knowledge predicates, the sample had to
be reduced to 35 languages. The results of my analysis of Cristofaro's
data are depicted in Table 5. It shows the distribution of independent
9 Even though Cristofaro uses Stassen's terminology, for reasons of perspicuity
I prefer to use Haspelmath's terms dependent and independent in the following.