Neurolinguistic & psycholinguistic investigations on evidentiality in Turkish

2.1.1.
 
Turkish evidentials and past time reference 
Evidentiality is defined as the grammatical category referring to the 
information source (Aikhenvald, 2004). Evidentials are considered to be 
deictic tools that index the information source for a given statement 
(Aikhenvald, 2003, 2004; Boas, 1938; Jakobson, 1957; Mushin, 2000; 
Willett, 1988). Traditionally, evidential forms are classified under two 
general classes on the basis of whether the speaker has ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ 
evidence
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(Aikhenvald, 2003; Givón, 1982; Lazard, 2001; Slobin & Aksu, 
1982; Willett, 1988), however see also Cornillie (2009) and Tantucci (2013) 
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The direct versus indirect categorization of the evidentials has been discussed in 
Cornillie (2009) and Tantucci (2013). The latter account, for example, distinguishes 
the evidentials as domain marking for ‘acquired information’ rather than specific 
categories for ‘information source’. Tantucci (2013) establishes an evidential 
category of interpersonal evidentiality on the basis of interpersonal knowledge 
regardless of the information source. He discusses, however, that evidential 
constructions encoding particular information sources may be seen as a sub-class of 
the semantic scope of the ‘acquired knowledge’. The current paper does not deal 
with theoretical issues on broader scope of evidentiality. Since Turkish marks 
evidentials morphologically, and the experiment we designed corresponds to 
particular information sources, we adopt the view ‘evidentials as indicators of 
information source’. 

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for alternative accounts on direct-indirect dichotomy. See Figure 2.1 for an 
illustration of direct and indirect evidence perspectives in Turkish. 
Evidential distinctions are expressed through the tense/aspect (and mood) 
inflections in Turkish (Aksu-Koç & Slobin, 1986; Sezer, 2001; Slobin & 
Aksu, 1982). Thus, Turkish evidentials have binary referential components: 
attribution to the category of information source and reference to time.