Believing p, discovering ¬p: 'Meğer' and epistemic shifts

Abstract

This paper provides the first formal semantic treatment of meğer clauses in Turkish, focusing on their presuppositional and evidential properties. Meğer clauses uniquely encodes a doxastic shift, asserting a proposition that the speaker previously believed to be false but now believes to be true. Additionally, the study explores the obligatory occurrence of the so-called indirect evidential marker -mI in meğer clauses, proposing that the contexts satisfying the presuppositions of meğer inherently satisfy the presuppositions of -mIș . Hence, in such contexts, -mIș is preferred over direct evidentiality as a result of Maximize Presupposition! (Heim, 1991). By analyzing meğer, this study aims to contribute to the broader understanding of evidentiality, presuppositions, and epistemic shifts in natural language.