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Using evidential expressions to indicate one’s source of information for an utterance tends to convey uncertainty on the speaker’s part. Previous accounts of this uncertainty inference attribute it to either extralinguistic reasoning about evidence directness, or to pragmatic reasoning about alternative utterances. Here we present a novel hybrid account, and introduce a set of utterances which allows us to tease apart the three accounts’ predictions. We test these predictions in two studies by manipulating the directness of evidence indicated by an evidential expression. Exp. 1 shows that listeners infer more uncertainty with extreme values of directness. Exp. 2 shows that speakers are more likely to indicate evidence in contexts where the evidence is unreliable. We argue that these findings support an account which involves both extralinguistic and pragmatic reasoning, and develop a formal implementation of such an account within the Rational Speech Act framework.

Copulative perception verbs such as English sound have received scant attention relative to other perception verbs, especially in non-European languages. In Hebrew, these verbs can take both adjectival and adverbial complements, a fact which sets Hebrew apart from previously studied languages, and which has heretofore been overlooked. This article investigates the usage of Hebrew copulative perception verbs with adverbial complements, with adjectival complements, and in impersonal constructions. A large-scale corpus study and a preference experiment reveal that each of these three constructions has a different interpretation. With adverbial complements, the verbs have an “attributary” meaning, attributing properties to perceptual impressions of objects. The complement slot in these cases is restricted to subjective multidimensional properties, which previous accounts of the attributary meaning fail to predict, motivating a novel analysis in terms of dimension selection. With adjectival complements, as well as in impersonal constructions, the verbs have a parenthetical meaning, taking and modifying a proposition argument. The two constructions are not equivalent, however. With adjectival complements, the verbs encode evidential but not epistemic information, and vice versa in impersonal constructions, reinforcing the need to maintain a distinction between the classes of evidentials and epistemic modals.