The Evolution and Functions of Evidentials in dialects of Turkish

This paper explores evidentials in various dialects of Turkish spoken across Anatolia, scrutinizing their semantic domains, diversity, and evolution paths. The data for analysis consists of fieldwork transcriptions, literary sources, and naturalistic recordings of everyday language. Adopting the definition of evidentiality as the coding of information sources on the proposition, we identified the items as denoting inference and hearsay under indirectivity based on the corpus. Findings show that certain lexical items developed into semi-grammatical evidentials via grammaticalization while the future and postterminal suffixes evolved into grammatical markers by interpreting existing items. The analysis also highlights the distribution of these evidentials, noting that while some remain confined to specific lin-guistic boundaries (isoglosses), others gain broader currency across dialects, pro-pelled by the influences of social media, TV shows, and migratory movements. Consequently, this paper sheds light on the dynamic paths of evidential evolution providing evidence from Turkish dialects, offering insights into the interplay between language change and socio-cultural factors.