toki!

[janKipo]

ike la jan Lope li kepeken pu lon tempo lili kin. toki pu li pona tawa ona la on a li kepeken pu. (I suspect he objects to 'kepeken pu' in place of 'kepeken e pu', as well. I object to 'pu' as a tp noun for the book, rather than a intransitive verb.)

[janTepanNetaPelin]

[jan_Lope]

[janTepanNetaPelin]

[jan_Lope]

[janKipo]

Since Lope ( and, I think, Tepan) don't see my comments, this pretty pointless, but the discussion seems a bit muddled. As far as I can make out, Lope is maintaining that only sentences can go before 'la', except for prepositional phrases beginning with 'lon', in which case the 'lon' is always dropped. If true, then phrases like 'tan ni la' "therefore" would have to be understood as 'lon tan ni' "at this cause" or "at the cause of this", neither of which is obviously what the expression means. I'm not sure why Lope takes this position in the face of both the corpus and pu, but clearly in those sources, 1) other prepositions than 'lon' can be fronted ( both 'tan' and 'tawa' have been offered and 'sama' as well) 2) other prepositions can be topped occasionally in fronting (arguably, 'mi la' is from 'tawa mi la' "according to me"), 3) all manner of other expressions ( we really need to work on that list) can occur before 'la' without plausible sentential or prepositional bases: 'nanpa wan', 'ike', 'ken', 'kin', and so on.

[janTepanNetaPelin]

[jan_Lope]

[janTepanNetaPelin]