complements of perception verbs

[Elena Maslova]

Dear Claudia,

this construction is very common in Yukaghir, and also occurs at  
least in some other languages of Siberia. A concise description of  
the Yukaghir construction can be found here:

http://www.stanford.edu/~emaslova/Publications/Perception.pdf

Lena


On Aug 25, 2006, at 5:48 AM, Claudia Wegener wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> In the language I'm working on (Savosavo, Papuan, Solomon Islands),  
> the complex clause used to talk about perceiving an event consists  
> of an independent (main) clause encoding the percept (i.e. the  
> event that is perceived), and a dependent clause encoding the 'act  
> of perception'. Judging from the literature I've read so far  
> (grammars as well as typological literature), this seems to be a  
> bit unusual - the percept seems to be usually encoded in the  
> dependent clause (as in English "I saw that he left").
>
> I'd be grateful
> 1. if any of you'd know of other languages that put perception  
> verbs such as 'see' and 'hear' in a dependent clause, and the  
> percept in the main clause, or
> 2. if you could point me to any typological or theoretical  
> literature mentioning this that I might have missed!
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Claudia Wegener
>
> -- 
> Claudia Wegener
> Insitut für Sprachwissenschaft
> Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
> Merangasse 70
> 8010 Graz
> Austria
>
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> Email: wegener at ling.uni-graz.at