Common ground management via evidential markers in Turkish

Abstract

This paper is a reanalysis of the Turkish evidential markers as Common Ground management tools. Based on conversational data from Turkish National Corpus and a real-life example from the media, I demonstrate how the traditional description of these markers fails to account for their dialogic uses. The data presented in this paper show that Turkish speakers alternate between these markers in order to mark their epistemic relation to the utterance content relative to their addressee. The relevant pragmatic notions marked with the Turkish evidential system are asymmetric and symmetric epistemic relation of the speaker and addressee, resulting in the speaker’s evaluation of epistemic primacy and shared information, respectively. Turkish also has another symmetric position where the speaker abstains from primacy claim without specifying the addressee’s epistemic relation. These observations lead to the conclusion that Turkish evidentiality is in fact an intersubjective epistemic category in the pragmatic component of language where intersubjectivity is defined as the speaker’s evaluation of the interlocutors’ differential perspectives.