The Derived Particles Of Possessive Pronouns As Attitudinal Stance Markers In Mongolian

This paper intends to show that possessive pronouns can be grammaticalized intoparticles to express speaker’s attitude and when the change happens, their concretelexical meanings usually become weaker and some innovative grammatical meaningappear, i.e. stance marking. By the diachronic and discourse analysis, we canconclude that mini、chini、mani、tani in Mongolian are the derived forms of possessivepronouns minu,chinu,manai,tanai respectively, and they developed their stancemarking functions from the source meanings of possessiveness to express speaker’sproximal and distal stances. From typological perspective it is a commonphenomenon existed in some Altaic languages including Bryat, Dagur, Kalmag etc.We hope the analysis of this stance marking strategy can contribute to the furtherstudies on the relationship between the realizations of stance constructions and theirfunctions.