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Perception and control: a Minimalist analysis of English direct perception complements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 1998

CLAUDIA FELSER
CLAUDIA FELSER
Affiliation:
University of Essex
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Abstract

In this article I argue that both bare infinitival and participial complements of perception verbs in English are clausal constituents headed by the functional category Aspect, and differ only with respect to their aspectual value. Further, I argue that perception verbs license aspectual complements by virtue of being able to function as event control predicates, that is, they allow a control relation to be established between their own and the event argument provided by the predicate of the complement clause. It is shown that the entire cluster of syntactic and semantic properties that characterize direct perception constructions follows from the proposed analysis, in conjunction with independently motivated principles of grammar.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , September 1998 , pp. 351 - 385
Copyright
1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Some of the ideas discussed in this article were originally presented at the 1994 LAGB spring conference at Salford. I would like to thank Harald Clahsen, Andrew Radford, Laura Rupp, the audience at LAGB, and three anonymous JL referees for helpful comments and suggestions.