Even a cursory look at the history of the Korean language reveals that it is among those languages that productively recruit nominals in special contexts to encode diverse grammatical notions. The typical routes for the nominal to develop into grammatical markers are via the intermediate stage of the so-called light nouns. Among many such nominals, some forms such as cikyeng ``boundary`` and nolus ``work/role`` constitute an intriguing category in that they show peculiar functional-semantic extension patterns. In particular, in present-day Korean, these items, which were originally used as free morphemes functioning as fully lexical nouns and denoting physical spaces or situations have become stance markers, more especially, markers representing the negative viewpoint of the speaker toward the entity, state or event in present-day Korean. This paper investigates how the negative markers developed from the ``propositional`` level, i.e. lexical nouns, to the ``expressive`` level, i.e. stance markers (Traugott & Dasher 2002), within the grammaticalization framework. More especially, we will examine how the lexical items cikyeng and nolus have come to acquire grammatical meanings that carry the speaker``s subjective and negative evaluations in a situation.