EVIDENTIALITY IN TURKISH: NATIVE SPEAKER JUDGMENT
TÜRKÇE’DE TANITSALLIK: ANADİL KONUŞUCU VERİLERİ

Author : Demet GÜL
Number of pages : 17-29

Abstract

Linguistic evidentiality is the category where the information source is explicitly coded in the sentence. The main types of evidentials are direct evidence (audio, visual, sensory) and indirect evidence (inferential, assumptive, reported/hearsay). Languages differ in how and which evidential types they grammaticalize. Our study presents an empirical work on Turkish evidentials.Our study mainly focuses on the following questions: i.Which evidential meanings are coded with [mIş]?ii.What are the tense, and aspect values coded with {mIş} with and without other verbal suffixes?iii.Which suffixes are used to code direct evidentiality, inference, assumptive and reportative/hearsay in Turkish? The study presents analyses of a series of surveys where native speakers of Turkish are asked to identify the type of evidence coded in the sentences, to identify the tense, aspect and modal values of particular verbal suffixes, and to decide which verbal suffixes are used to code given evidential value to the sentence. The native-speaker test results show that Turkish distinguishes between the direct and indirect evidentials. Our study puts forward that, in Turkish, the one and only grammatical marker of evidentiality is {mIş} with indirect evidential meaning, whereas any aspect marker, i.e. {Iyor}, {DI}, and copula on nominal sentences, may indicate that the speaker is presenting the information from his/her own conscious, i.e direct evidentiality. That is to say, if the sentence is not marked with {mIş} then it is marked with direct evidential no matter which tense or aspect markers are used.

Keywords

Modality, Evidentiality, Morphology, Semantics, Typology

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