Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

(ii) Using mI immediately before the predicate to question the whole proposition:
Placing mI after a particular phrase can also serve the purpose of questioning the
whole proposition:
(32) Nermin okul-a mı git-miş?
Nermin school-DAT INT go-EV/PF
‘Has Nermin gone to school?’
As noted in 19.1.1.1, questioning the whole proposition is also done by means of placing
mI after the predicate:
(33) Nermin okula gitmiş mi?
However, although both of these questions involve the whole proposition, they cannot be
used in the same context. The difference between them is that questions that have the
structure of (32) are used when the speaker has an assumption about the situation s/he is
asking about, usually because there are non-linguistic clues (visual, or perceptible by
other senses) available to him/her. Those like (33), on the other hand, are out-of-the-blue
questions, where the speaker has no assumptions about the situation. For example, a
speaker can use (34a) upon seeing that the addressee is wearing a coat, a context which is
totally unsuitable for (34b). (34b), on the other hand, is used in contexts where a speaker
simply wants to know if the addressee will be going out that day or not, a context in
which (34a) cannot be used.
(34)
(a) Sokağa mı çıkıyorsun?
(b) Sokağa çıkıyor musun?
‘Are you going out?’
The same phenomenon occurs in existential sentences as well:
(35) Bir sıkıntın mı var?
‘Are you worried about something?’
(36) Bir sıkıntın var mı?
‘Do you have any troubles?’
Questions 257
(iii) Using mI as an expression of surprise or disbelief:
mI can be placed after a particular constituent within a clause to highlight surprise or
disbelief. In this case, the constituent just before mI is not the target of the question.
Instead, the validity of the whole proposition is questioned. Such sentences have an
intonation pattern similar to wh-questions (19.2), which is a slight rise followed by a fallrise,
but they usually start with a higher pitch than wh-questions. The phrase that mI is
attached to usually occurs just before the predicate: