CHOI Sung-ho et al. (2010). Syntactic Category Converter in Mongolian: Its Typological Character. Altai Hakpo20: 105-125. The Altaic Society of Korea.

This paper argues that SAN-class affixes in Mongolian are inflectional affixes transforming the preceding VP into NP; in other words, the phrase with these affixes is internally VP, but externally NP. This claim entails the following facts: first, they are phrase-level edge affixes, second, it is pointless to assign a new part-of-speech to thus formed morphological construction. The paper provides an interesting parallelism between inflectional and derivational affixes, which can be stated in terms of semantic modification and syntactic alteration. The affixes under our investigation function not only to change syntactic categoryhood of the preceding phrase, but also to add a certain aspectual meaning to it.

Keywords: Mongolian, syntax, syntactic category, syntactic function, inflection, derivation