The Acquisition of Syntactically Encoded Evidentiality

Abstract

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.