PERCEPTION AND CONTROL - A MINIMALIST ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH DIRECT PERCEPTION COMPLEMENTS

In this article I argue that both bare infinitival and participial com plements of perception verbs in English are clausal constituents heade d by the functional category Aspect, and differ only with respect to t heir aspectual value. Further, I argue that perception verbs license a spectual complements by virtue of being able to function as event cont rol predicates, that is, they allow a control relation to be establish ed between their own and the event argument provided by the predicate of the complement clause. It is shown that the entire cluster of synta ctic and semantic properties that characterize direct perception const ructions follows from the proposed analysis, in conjunction with indep endently motivated principles of grammar.