This paper discusses the syntactic and interpretive properties of declarative sentences with immediately postverbal subjects in European Portuguese. The primary aim of this investigation is to examine whether the VSX constituent order corresponds to one or several syntactic structures with concomitant interpretive effects. The conclusion is that VSX represents two main types of syntactic structures associated with different interpretive effects. The relevant data are described and analyzed within the generative framework. According to the proposed analysis, in one type of structure the verb and the postverbal subject stay inside the IP space, whereas in the other type the verb or both the verb and the subject move to positions in the CP space, i.e. the sentential left periphery (Rizzi, 1997(Rizzi, , 2004, and subsequent cartographic approaches). The 'IP type' VSX sentences have a thetic, wide focus interpretation with no single constituent assigned any type of informational highlighting (Kuroda, 1972(Kuroda, , 2005. It is suggested that theticity is a kind of sensory (especially visual) evidentiality. This motivates the presence of an Evidential head in the functional structure of the IP, which is targeted by verb movement. Sentences with the 'CP type' VSX order do not constitute a homogeneous group, but share an evaluative import, generally conveying criticism. Under the proposed analysis, those bearing focus on the subject are derived by movement of the subject DP to Spec,FocusP (Rizzi, 1997(Rizzi, , 2004, which gives it the contrastive interpretation, and movement of the verb to a higher Evaluative head in the sentential left periphery (Ambar, 1999;Corr, 2016). Inverted conditionals (Iatridou and Embick, 1994) and coordinate non-degree exclamatives (Martins, 2013) share verb movement to Evaluative with subject-focus VSX sentences, but do not display contrastive or other highlighting of the subject, which signals that FocusP plays no role in their derivations.