Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

3. CRITERIA FOR THE STRUCTURAL CHARACTERIZATION 67
patterning like an auxiliary (Mittwoch, 1990; Radford, 1997). The
latter claim is illustrated by the parallelism of the two sentences below:
(47) a. It's vital that John should show anyinterest.
b. It's vital for John to show anyinterest.
Radford (1997), 48
It is beyond the scope of this thesis to resolve the issue as to which
category the in nitival to should be associated with. To-PVCs are not
introduced by to the way that-PVCs are introduced by that. Instead,
the to directly precedes the predicate of the complement. In this respect,
to is similar to the subjunctive particle na in Greek, which is
shown in chapter 6. For the sake of simplicity, I will call the in nitival
to in the following a particle and investigate it together with the
complementizer. 10
3.2. Subject/object case. In section 1.1, I have already outlined
the changes in case marking that the core arguments of each complement
type are subjected to (see Table 1). Regarding the PVC subject,
I noted the following: that-PVCs are the only PVC type retaining the
nominative case for their subject (48-a). NI-PVCs (48-b), ing-PVCs
and to-PVCs have accusative subjects while the two nominalizations,
PNOMs (48-c) and INOMs, have genitive subjects.
(48) a. Jim saw that he arrived.
b. Jim saw him arrive.
c. Jill heard his singing of the song.
Regarding the case of the PVC objects, except for PNOMs, all remain
in the accusative. A PNOM takes an indirect object in the form
of a PP consisting of the preposition of and an accusative object NP.
This type of indirect object is called the objective genitive. However,
Vendler (1968) notes that for certain transitive verbs that can optionally
be intransitive, the of -phrase can also contain a genitive NP
denoting the subject, i.e. a subjective genitive: the shooting of the
prisoners can be interpreted as either The prisoners shoot or as Somebody
shoots the prisoners. This becomes apparent when using personal
pronouns as in example (49). The genitive pronoun his in (49-a) can
refer either to the patient like in the objective genitive of him in (49-b)
or to the agent as in the subject genitive of his in (49-c).
10 Regarding the semantic potential of the particle to refer to section 4.5.