POS - first pass

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janMato
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Re: POS - first pass

Post by janMato »

Yes, this pattern is toki nasa. There are a few people that don't like this pattern and the style- which is to treat tp as a full language and to use all the tricks available to express anything one might want to.

My take on what is going on with the "S li prep Noun e Noun" pattern is that the toki pona sentence template has only so many slots, so to say more things, people are putting all things in all slots, including ones where the jan Pije lessons and jan Sonja canon text (what little of it exists) don't have a lot of examples.

This pattern starts with the canonical "jan li tawa tomo" He is going home. I argued with this one until I found a ref to a natural language that had predicates (I am a man, The apple is red) that indicated motion ( * I am to store, bad English, but okay in some languages) Then, again, with only a few slots available, why not tack on direct objects/"e" phrases. * I to store my car -> I took my car to the store. This is based on the canonical pattern, "mi loje e len" I cause the direct object, len, to have the qualities of the stuff between li and e, loje. I make the cloth read. So mi tawa esun e tomo tawa mi means, "I cause my car to move towards the store" This pattern can easily be applied to lon and sama. It doesn't seem to be chain-able (ie. putting two things that look like prep phrases between li and e.) Some prep phrases have no obvious meaning when between li and e.

As I've said before, I think the stuff that follows the word after "li" and is before "e" is poorly defined. When things are poorly defined, its kind of like 1st usage (or first mistake) in the community will set the standard, after all, few toki pona fans are going to fire up the concordance application, write an appropriate regex, find all similar usages, work out the likely translation, and decide if a new phrase is being used to mean something outside of what the canon supports.

When all the slots are filled in, it there just isn't a lot of guidance on what the sentence is allowed to mean-other than jan Kipo's cataloging of how meaning changes as people fill in the various slots in the toki pona template, and maybe doing corpus searches.
majika
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Location: Gold Coast, Australia

Re: POS - first pass

Post by majika »

toki! mi wile e ni: sina suno li pona!

I find this discussion really interesting! Once again I find myself struggling with that type of sentence:
> mi tawa esun e tomo tawa mi

Can you tell me where that idiom comes from? I understand "mi/sina tawa esun" or "ona li tawa esun", but when those sentences are extended with an "e" phrase, I just find myself screaming "Where's the verb?!?!"

I understand the concept that TP sentences have a kind of 'zero copula' that we translate with "to be" / "to go" - intransitive verbs - in English:
> ona li tawa esun - He (goes) to the shops.
> mi jan - I (am) a man.

But if we extend sentences like those with an "e"-phrase, it's like we're trying to add an object to the (implied) intransitive verb. We can't do that with any other intransitive verbs, can we?
> ona li moli - He died.
> ?ona li moli e soweli - ?He died the cat

I can see you're attributing that sort of construction with a causative meaning: "He caused the cat to die / He killed the cat". I didn't see anything like that in the lessons, however! The only 'causative' thing I remember was using "kama" in a transitive sense:
> mi kama e pakala - I caused an accident.
> sina kama e ni: mi moli - You caused me to die.
> ona li kama e ni: tomo tawa mi li tawa esun - He caused my car to go to the shop.
> ona li kama e ni: ona li moku e kili - She made him eat the fruit.

I'm confused!!
//majika
janMato
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Re: POS - first pass

Post by janMato »

1st off, if its a matter of aesthetics, then don't forget you don't have to use this particular construction (or the rest of the on-the-edge, pressing-the-limits sorts of constructions).

2nd Which particular argument for or against this construction doesn't make sense or isn't convincing? I think this thread is starting to repeat itself (or I'm thinking of another one). If I understand jan Kipo, he analyses all noun, adjective and prep phrase predicates as intransitive verbs (being red, being a man, being in the state of moving toward something), and adding and direct object means you are transforming the DO in some manner to make it red, a man, or in the state of moving towards something. I like the mental model of predicates. I tend to analyse these things as if there is a prepositional phrase in between the li and the e. The canonical support comes from the tawa/kama examples which don't take marked complements and the way predicate adjective phrases can canonically take "e" phrases and mean "to transform the DO to be characterized by the stuff in between li and e"

3rd off, (man I like numbering things, very untokiponish) I think the root of this comes from the part of speech notes on the classic word list. Those POS categories imply a world where POS works differently than it seems to work when most people attempt to write toki pona. jan Sonja on live journal at one point said they are there for guidance-- this was in response to someone trying to resolve some argument about using words outside of their POS class.

4th. This isn't really about causation. If I said so, I was wrong. It's more about transformation.

Definitely a causative:
jan Montesuma li kama jan Kotesu e ni: jan Kotesu li moku e soweli pi palisa lili mute.
Motezuma made Cortez eat porcupine.

More like a transformative (for lack of a better word)
jan Montesuma li laje e jan Kotesu
Motezuma painted Cortez red.

5th. the copula.
(This assumes you don't prefer to analyze all predicates as intransitive verbs)

Using the jargon from "Describing Morphosyntax" toki pona has 2 predicate strategies:

juxtaposition, e.g. NP NP
mi jan suli.
sina jan suli.

copula is an invariant particle (invariant to anything that comes before or after)
jan suli li jan pali.
jan mute li jan pali.
meli li jan pali.
soweli li jan pali.
kiwen li suli.
kiwen li kiwen mute.

The claims that toki pona has a zero-copula are unnecessary, because juxtaposition and an invariant particle describe the situation just fine without invoking invisibles.
majika wrote: > ona li tawa esun - He (goes) to the shops.
> mi jan - I (am) a man.
You really need a * beside the first one to indicate you are giving an example that you know is defective English.

* He to the shops.
He goes to the shops.

English requires a verb (and a semantically rich one) for predicates of location and motion.
janKipo
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Re: POS - first pass

Post by janKipo »

Two quick notes 1 'majika' is illegit, since 'ji'' is one of the four forbidden syllables (the reason for which always escapes me when I use one)
2.'jan Montesuma li kama jan Cotesu e ni', while grammatical (its hard to string tp words together and not get something grammatical), doesn't say what you want: 'jan Cotesu' is a modifier of 'kama,' most likely an adverb of manner (I'm assuming that proper adjectives automatically right group with their generic head) 'kama' doesn't take a noun phrase complement, but a verb phrase (it's a Modal).

'jan li kama e pakala' is simply a causative derivative from intransitive 'kama' "happen, occur," just another typical case of that shift.

The POS on page 1 a-k at nimipitokipona.blogspot.com are based on such things: each word is put into a POS that best explains its meaning in a variety of slots: head noun, modifier, verb i, verb t, preposition, and so on. And, aside from prepositions so far, almost every word in tp can occur in all those slots, and many do.

I've basically said my piece (several times on several threads) on all this. You don't have to use any given construction (aside from the basics) in tp, but you ought to be prepared to recognize them when they come.

No copulas, no articles. If most of the major languages of the world can manage, so can we.
janKipo
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Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm

Re: POS - first pass

Post by janKipo »

Ooops! Home page and tpnimi.blogspot.com
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