Toki Pona Forums

Intransitive verbs and verbs without e, do they have an oblique more often than not? In otherwords, do they act like the English "to speak of something," or the various IE languages that don't characteristically take the accusative, but instead take a genitive, dative or the corresponding prepositional phrase. My search probably discarded a lot of valid verbs that use obliques, but I think the pattern remains. There are probably a lot of verbs that take both an accusative and an oblique (mi pana e moku tawa jan), but that would be a harder set of searches.

kepeken, lon tawa are common obliques for many verbs. weka seems to have an affinity for tan.

The most common oblique constructions are:
li toki kepeken
li toki tawa
li pana tawa
li weka tan
li lukin tawa

sama doesn't really seem to fit the whole pattern. No verb has a strong affinity for poka, lon insa/anpa/sewi/sike. Lots of verbs occur with lon, but there doesn't seem to be any particular affinity between them.

Thanks! Yes, context is vital here.

li lon X e Y is still a bugger to parse.

it behaves a bit like prepositional predicates of motion (metaphorical and otherwise), like mi kama jan lawa, mi tawa tomo mi

it is a bit like
* I fasten to this location

But it requires one more arugement. "e" is the case of last resort, it appears, so the 2nd argument takes "e"

? mi lon len noka jan e supa anpa.
I glued the man's shoes to the floor.

See list.
'lon' is P, a preposition "at". As a transitive verb is means "cause the DO to be at [complement]" just like 'tawa' as a vt means "cause DO to be toward [complement]" i.e. "move DO to" and so on.
'lon kasi' means (almost anywhere)"at/in the/a plant"; context makes this a Christmas tree. ("modified" may not be the best word here)
It's in the book (see also the original dictionary sheets, which are rather more complex)
The interesting thing with 'lon' is what happens without the NP complement, where it implies "existence" or "truth" as complement.
Mato -- argument talk gets confusing in tp (nice as it may be in Lojban -- though it gets to be a bugger there, too). 'lon' here is a transitive verb, so, ipso facto, it takes a direct object (or maybe conversely). It is also a preposition, so, ipso facto, it takes a NP complement. Parsing is a snap: subj li vt(prep) NPcomp e DO
Your example is pretty much bass ackwards: it says "I put the floor on the man's shoes.", no glue implied.

Thought, confirmed by the stats, suggest that 'tomo' should be A or V, probably A, "built, constructed, fabricated"

Sorry, but that is the way the grammar crumbles. 'lon' is basically a preposition, and, as such, can have a noun complement in context (I haven't seen it tried in modifier slots, but, then ....) Like most tp words, it can be used as a noun ("placing, presence, address" "existence, truth, reality"). a verb ("place, put, insert", "create, verify"), and a modifier (so far without complements , so "real, existent, true"). With a small vocabulary, words have to do extra work (and they don't get paid extra).