A history of English evidential verbs of appearance

In this corpus-based article we explore the development of evidential meanings in English verbs of appearance, together with their acquisition of evaluative meanings. We explore the relationship of these semantic changes to the question of whether there is an increase in subjectivity diachronically, and we show that subjectivity is orthogonal to both developments: an increase in subjectivity appears rather to go with the spread of small clause constructions