Mandarin perception-verb complements: hierarchies and properties

Abstract Perception, involving five sense modalities, namely sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, is traditionally analyzed as a binary distinction between direct and indirect perception. This distinction leads to the identification of two complement types of perception verbs (e.g., see , hear , feel in English): either a verbal or a clausal complement. This paper provides a systematic description of perception verbs and their complementation patterns in Mandarin Chinese within the hierarchical framework of Functional Discourse Grammar, supported by naturally occurring examples retrieved from corpora. It has been found that, unlike Dik and Hengeveld (1991. The hierarchical structure of the clause and the typology of perception-verb complements. Linguistics 29. 231–259), who propose four semantic complement types of perception verbs, and Hengeveld et al. (2019. Perception verbs in Brazilian Portuguese: A functional approach. Open Linguistics 5. 268–310), who identify five, Mandarin exhibits six semantic complement types. Since the parameters typically used to differentiate complement types in the literature are largely morphologically oriented and therefore inapplicable to isolating languages such as Mandarin, this paper investigates the formal distinctions by examining their syntactic properties. By using four relevant tests, this study reveals a finite versus non-finite pattern among clausal complements in Mandarin. Furthermore, drawing on evidence from Mandarin, this research refines the two typological implicational hierarchies for perception complementation proposed by Hengeveld et al. (2019) by incorporating the Propositional Content layer into the semantic hierarchy and by reformulating the relations between the lower layers and the Communicated Content layer.