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The principal aims of this thesis are (i) to provide an analysis of direct perception complements within Chomsky’s(1995) minimalist framework, (ii) to provide an answer for the old puzzle of why these verbs appear to select for different infinitival complements in their active and passive forms within Chomsky’s(2000, 2001) Agree framework. Section 2 and 3 deal with the meaning and syntactic structure of perception verb complements, respectively. Perception verbs followed by bare infinitval complements denote the immediate sensory perception of an event or situation. When combined with a fully infinitival complement, on the other hand, perception verbs take on an epistemic reading, giving rise to what we have called an indirect perception interpretation. In section 4, some assumptions are made in order to analyze the syntactic structure of perception verb complements. We suppose that the eventive reading in the case of a bare infinitive is associated with TP, whereas the epistemic reading with a to-infinitive is associated with CP. Also, the infinitival marker to in the passive form is analyzed as a dummy Case-marker used as a last resort strategy to license the infinitival projection. We propose, in section 5, that the unavailability of perceptual reports in the passive can be derived from the familiar assumption that the argument structure of -en participle is impoverished, and the Case- checking theory.