News Article: Evidentiality and Passives (B2)

Turkish news prose is one of the few registers where the grammar you learned as “optional flavour” suddenly becomes obligatory machinery. Reporters do not simply state facts; they mark where information came from, they background the people who did things, and they name institutions with long suffix-chained titles. The text below is an original news article, written for this guide in authentic journalistic register — it reports nothing real, but it behaves exactly like a wire-service story. Read each sentence, then read the note that follows it.

The article

Notice how the sentence opens. Çevre ve Şehircilik Bakanlığı (“Ministry of Environment and Urbanisation”) is an izafet chain — a string of nouns where the head, Bakanlık (“ministry”), carries the possessive -ı that binds the whole title together. Turkish builds official names this way rather than with adjectives, so reading the news means parsing these chains fluently; see nouns/izafet-chains. The phrase …göre (“according to”) is the workhorse attribution device of journalistic Turkish, and it governs the dative-marked source, here folded inside yapılan açıklamaya (“to the statement that was made”). This first event — the earthquake — is reported with plain past -DI (meydana geldi) because the agency itself confirmed it; the reporter treats it as established fact.

Here the verb of attribution is bildirdi (“reported”), and everything before it is a nominalised report: can kaybı yaşanmadığı (“that loss of life was not experienced”) and hasar oluştuğu (“that damage occurred”). The reporter is relaying officials' words, but because the source is explicitly named, the plain past stays. This is the crucial register lesson: Turkish does not force -mIş on everything reported — it forces it on the unconfirmed. See register/journalistic for how attribution verbs (bildirdi, açıkladı, belirtti) structure a whole story.

A textbook agentless passive: sevk edildi (“was dispatched”). The teams are foregrounded; whoever dispatched them is deliberately omitted because, in news prose, the who is often institutional, obvious, or beside the point. English would often supply a vague “they”; Turkish simply drops the agent and leans on the passive, which is why passives are so much denser in Turkish news than in casual speech.

Now compare the agentful passive: AFAD ekipleri tarafından başlatıldı (“was begun by AFAD teams”). When a reporter does want to credit the actor, they reintroduce it with …tarafından (“by”), which always follows the agent and takes no case on the noun itself. This is where English speakers stumble — they reach for a preposition before the agent, but in Turkish the agent comes first and tarafından trails it. See verbs/passive-agent-tarafindan. Note also hasar tespit çalışmaları, another izafet chain (“the damage-assessment work”).

This is the sentence the whole article was building towards. sürmüş (“reportedly lasted”) is the reportative -mIş: the reporter was not there, the duration comes from witnesses, and the suffix flags the entire claim as second-hand. Pair it with the opening attribution …anlattığına göre (“according to what they described”) and you have the canonical journalistic hedge. The deep logic: -mIş is not a tense, it is an evidential — it says “I did not witness this; I am passing it on.” See verbs/evidential-mis. An English speaker who writes sürdü here would be claiming to have personally timed the tremor, which is exactly the false authority a careful reporter avoids.

Back to a confirmed, named source — Uzmanlar … uyardı (“Experts warned”) — so the plain past returns. Inside sits a future-leaning nominalisation, devam edebileceği (“that it could continue”), the kind of suffix-stacked complement that B2 readers must learn to unpack.

The closing sentence reuses every device at once: an institution named by izafet-less single noun Valilik (“governorship”), a passive folded into a future nominalisation tatil edileceği (“that they would be closed”), and an attribution verb duyurdu (“announced”). Because the governorship is the named source, no -mIş is needed — the announcement is on the record.

Why this register matters

For English speakers the hardest habit to build is attribution hedging. English journalism leans on adverbs and reporting verbs (“allegedly,” “sources say”) but still mostly uses ordinary past tense. Turkish moves that work into the verb's own morphology with -mIş, and into a small toolkit of phrases — …göre, …olduğu bildirildi (“it was reported that…”), …iddia edildi (“it was claimed that…”). Leaving them out does not just sound flat; it makes you assert things the original speaker only reported, which in a news context is a factual error of stance.

The second habit is passive-by-default. Where English writes “police arrested twelve people,” Turkish prefers on iki kişi gözaltına alındı (“twelve people were taken into custody”) unless crediting the police is the point — at which moment polis tarafından reappears. Train your eye to expect the patient first and the agent (if any) trailing behind tarafından.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• News prose is the register where evidentiality and the passive do real work: -mIş flags unconfirmed claims, the passive backgrounds agents.
• Named source + attribution verb (bildirdi, uyardı, duyurdu) → plain past -DI; witness-based or vague source → reportative -mIş.
• …göre, …olduğu bildirildi, and …tarafından are the three phrases you must read fluently; the agent always precedes tarafından.
• Institution names are izafet chains — keep the possessive on the head noun (Bakanlığı, çalışmaları), or the chain breaks.
• Reported clauses become nominalised complements (yaşanmadığını, edileceğini), never finite clauses, before an attribution verb.