Visual perception verbs and degrees of certainty in Turkish: The case of görünmek and gözükmek

Abstract

This study aims at describing the meaning extensions and functions of the object-oriented see type verbs ‘görünmek’ and ‘gözükmek’ in Turkish in terms of the evidential status and epistemic stance they encode. The observations of this research are based on corpora obtained from Turkish National Corpus.The results indicate that görün- and gözük- share some common features in terms of their functions in discourse. They are both used evidentially with indirect evidence. TNC corpus in general shows that görün- in Turkish presents a dichotomous structure from subjective to intersubjective forms. The subjective forms ‘görün-, gibi görün’ have the highest usage of the objective personal pronoun ‘bana’ and the possessive form ‘gözüme’ indicating the involvement of the speakers/writers to the situation presented. When speakers/writers present their utterances in intersubjective point of view, they prefer the parenthetical forms such as ‘görünen o ki’ without any objective personal pronouns involved. This suggests that speakers/writers do not take the responsibility of the truthiness of their utterances in intersubjective mode.

Keywords

• visual perception
• verbs
• turkish epistemic stance
• certainty
• evidentiality