Grounding in terms of anchoring relations

This chapter aims to contribute to the understanding of the connection between ‘present time reference’ and the evidential category ‘new information’ by investigating the epistemic associations of the Turkish ‘continuous aspect’ marker -Iyor (when used as the only TAM marker on a verbal predicate), with analyses based on the framework of anchoring relations developed in Temürcü (2007). Similar to Brisard’s (2002b, 2005) analysis of the English present progressive construction, -Iyor is shown to be associated with ‘epistemic contingency’. The treatment is then compared to the epistemic account of tenses and aspects in Cognitive Grammar. It is argued that temporal and epistemic categories should be taken as distinct but interacting components of sentence meaning and that the connection between ‘present time reference’ and ‘new information’ is best explained in terms of metonymy.