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Many studies find true verbal passives in English acquired only after age four, but some find three-year-olds fully adultlike. We explain this discrepancy using Relativized Minimality (RM, Rizzi 2004). Collins (2005a) argues the passive involves movement of the logical object across the logical subject (either PRO, or a lexical DP with 'by'), and normally this requires smuggling. We propose smuggling is maturationally unavailable until age four. Three-year-olds succeed only if the intervener is eliminated, as in certain Romance reflexive-clitic constructions; or if +Topic/+WH on the logical object can prevent an RM violation, as in certain studies of the English passive. Following Grillo (2008), we explain the still-later acquisition of non-actional passives by their need for both smuggling and semantic coercion.

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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