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.