Орчин цагийн монгол хэлний нэгдүгээр биеийн олон тооны төлөөний үгсийн тухай ажигласан нь

Observations on the first person plural pronoun in Modern Mongolian

This paper tries to identify all the first person plural pronoun morphemes in Modern Mongolian spoken in Mongolia. For this purpose, observations were made on various data, including the articles, columns, and comments found in the Mongolian internet media, blog posts, and Twitter feeds. Transcriptions of some 600 interviews provided by The Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia, University of Cambridge served as another major data for this research. Attempts were made to determine if there is any functional, semantic, or pragmatic distinction among the morphemes /biden/, /bidan/, /bid nar/, /bidnuus/, /bidnüüs/, /bidnuud/, /bidnüüd/, /byadan/, /byad nar/, /bid hed/, /man/, /manuus/, /manuud/, /manai/, /manai hed/, /man’/, /manius/, /maniud/, and /man’ hed/. The declension forms of each morpheme are presented in the tables. Attention was paid to know if the speaker’s age, gender, ethnic origin, education, or the native place has any influence in choosing any specific morpheme. The introduction to the derivational relationships among the morphemes, as well as the difference between the /manai/, the special genitive form of the morpheme /man/ and the /manai/, the underlying representation of the morpheme /manai/ is explained. Over a hundred sentences were chosen from the data and altered in average five to ten different sentences to investigate the native speaker’s intuition for the choosing any “proper” morpheme, or to find the possible nuance among the morphemes. Frequency in the data was compared among the morphemes. Special attention was paid to the genitive forms of /biden/ and /man/ to determine if a distinction exists between about the “inclusiveness” and “exclusiveness”. Historical developments were observed on /bidan/ and /man/ from Middle Mongolian to Modern Mongolian.