Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

3. CRITERIA FOR THE STRUCTURAL CHARACTERIZATION 65
In the next section the six complement types are characterized according
to a variety of structural characteristics. These characteristics
have been selected on the one hand because I consider them essential
for an adequate characterization of each complement type and on the
other because they are applicable to the description of PVCs in Akatek.
Hence, they form the structural basis of the cross-linguistic comparison
between English and Akatek PVC types at the end of chapter 5.
3. Criteria for the structural characterization
In his study of PNOMs and INOMs in English, Vendler (1967)
demonstrates that one of these two kinds of nominalizations retains
verbal characteristics such as tense, auxiliaries and adverbs. The other
kind has ceased to be verbal and has become fully nominal, i.e. it
can occur with articles, prenominal adjectives, and the objective genitive.
Cross-linguistically, Comrie & Thompson (1985) show that
for action nominals the situation is similar. Action nominals are nominalizations
derived from action verbs. In general, what is observable
is the extent to which a nominalized construction retains verbal characteristics.
More speci cally Comrie & Thompson (1985) establish
the following parameters for the description of action nominals:
1. The number of verbal versus nominal categories shown by the
head noun of the action nominal.
2. The case marking of the NPs in comparison with the corresponding
sentence.
3. The modi cation of the action nominal by adverbs or by adjectives.
According to Noonan (1985), for a cross-linguistic investigation of
complementtypes, the morphology of the complementverb, the syntax
of the complement clause, and the role of complementizers have tobe
examined as well as the external syntactic relation of the complement
construction. In English, PVCtypes are by de nition the direct objects
of a PV, i.e. the PV can take either an NP or one of a number of PVCs,
but not both. As will be explained below, this observation is one
argument for the constituency of the PVC types under investigation.
Which constituent type the di erent PVCs should be classi ed as has
been the center of much debate. Of the many constituency tests that
have been applied to PVCs (see e.g. Akmajian (1977)), I consider two
in detail: passivization and clefting. Passivization and clefting were
chosen because they have clear counterparts in Akatek and therefore
lend themselves most easily to comparison. For passivization, I consider
two possibilities. Either the whole PVC ismoved into the subject