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This article presents several empirical studies of syntactically encoded evidentiality in English. The first part of our study consists of an adult online experiment that confirms claims in Asudeh & Toivonen (2012) that raised Perception Verb Similatives (PVSs; e.g. John looks like he is sick) encode direct evidentiality. We then present the results of an acquisition study based on an exhaustive examination of the corpora of 45 American English-speaking children in the CHILDES database (McWhinney & Snow 1985). These results are consistent with the hypothesis that children as young as two behave like adults in their ability to correlate the syntax of these constructions with the type of evidence they have. This claim is supplemented by a direct comparison of children's and adults' PVS constructions in the corpora. Together, the studies constitute preliminary indication of children's ability to track and grammatically encode evidence source, even in "non-evidential" languages like English.

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The simplest form in which gradable adjectives are used—positive constructions, like John is tall—carry an additional semantic component, evaluativity, that is not part of the adjective’s lexicalized meaning. Evaluative constructions require that an entity instantiate a gradable predicate to a significantly high degree. This property holds of John is tall, but it fails to hold of some other adjectival constructions, like John is taller than Bill or John is 6 ft tall. The source of evaluativity has posed a challenge for semantic accounts of adjectives and adjectival constructions, which are tasked with explaining why the most basic use of gradable adjectives doesn’t reflect its core meaning. This book’s author's (2008) EVAL account capitalizes on notions of antonymy and markedness to account for the distribution of evaluativity across adjectival constructions, including the equative, which can be evaluative. This book sets these notions in a neo-Gricean framework of conversational implicature (Horn 1984; Levinson 2000). It presents an account of evaluativity across adjectival constructions as arising in some cases as a Quantity implicature (similar to the meaning attributed to tautologies like War is war) and in other cases as a Manner implicature (similar to the non-truth-conditional content of litotes like not uncommon). It attributes notable differences in where (i.e. matrix/subordinate clauses) and how (i.e. at-issue/not-at-issue content) evaluativity is encoded to the type of implicature and the question under discussion.