li chaining

[janMato]

In li-chains, can the e-phrase be embedded, or do all the verbs need to utilize the same subject clause and the same e-phrase(s)? And if e-phrases can be embedded, can the prep-phrases be embedded, too?

? meli li moku e telo seli li lukin li wile tawa.
The woman drinks coffee, sees, and wants to go.
source: http://www.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?f= ... a&start=30

I would have said...
meli li moku e telo. meli li lukin li wile tawa.

Are the following correct?

meli en jan li moku e telo. Both a guy and girl are drinking water.
meli en jan li moku e telo e suwi. Both a guy and girl are drinking water and eating sweets.
meli en jan li pali li moku e telo e suwi. Both a guy and girl prepare water and candy, and they they consume both.
meli en jan li pali li moku e telo e suwi kepeken luka. Both a guy and girl prepare water and candy, and they they consume both, each using their hands to do each prepare and consume thier food.

Damn, I think "li-chains" is one place where tp feels more concise than English, (without saying less-- the normal way of being concise in tp)

Logic puzzles
? meli anu jan anu soweli li pali li moku e telo e suwi. The girl or guy or animal prepared and ate both the water and candy.
? meli anu jan en soweli li pali li moku e telo e suwi. The guy (or the girl) and the animal prepared and ate both the water and the candy.

Stuff I'm not so sure about....
?/* mi wile e telo sewi anu e telo nasa. I want a soda or beer.
?/* mi wile telo e len kepeken ilo anu kepeken luka mi. I want to wash my cloth with either a machine or by hand.

[janKipo]

To your first stack of questions the answers seem to be "Yes". What is chained is the predicate, everything after the 'li': verb, object (also chainable) and prep phrases. Of course, reasonable restraint is recommended.
But what is NOT clear is whether the opposite can happen, whether the chained predicated can have the same objects (stated only once) or all be covered by the same PP, that is, whether the second pair sentences you give are rightly interpreted. I can't remember a clear case, though there are some possible ones. In any case, if they occur, they are in no way distinctively marked. We are back to the advice to divide things up as much as possible.
The scope rules for connectives relative to one another (and for 'anu' even whether it can connect sentences) are not settled (as they aren't in English) -- nor their relation to (also unsettled) 'ala'. The sentences appear to be grammatical, but what they mean is undecided or left ambiguous (for context). The same applies -- with less certainty -- to the ones you are not sure about.

[jan Ote]

? meli anu jan en soweli li pali li moku e telo e suwi. The guy (or the girl) and the animal prepared and ate both the water and the candy.

You get it wrong. The word 'jan' does not mean 'a guy' as an opposite to 'a girl', but 'a person' (male or female). There is no English ambiguity of 'a man' ('human' or 'male human') in tp 'jan'. When we want to say 'a person, a guy or a girl', then we use just 'jan'. You can also use 'meli anu mije', but it is redundant here.

[janMato]

? meli anu jan en soweli li pali li moku e telo e suwi. The guy (or the girl) and the animal prepared and ate both the water and the candy.

You get it wrong. The word 'jan' does not mean 'a guy' as an opposite to 'a girl', but 'a person' (male or female).

Well, it's a logic puzzle. Logic puzzles border on the edge of the sort of sentences real people would never say-- Horses or statues like peas or rainbows. I guess if the woman (meli) is subset of jan, then the invisible parensthesis would be (meli) anu (jan en soweli), i.e. we know for sure there was a woman, or if not that, then it was a person of unknown gender and an animal.

There is no English ambiguity of 'a man' ('human' or 'male human') in tp 'jan'. When we want to say 'a person, a guy or a girl', then we use just 'jan'. You can also use 'meli anu mije', but it is redundant here.

Guys vs jan
In American colloquial English (and maybe just in Colorado and Ohio where I grew up) "guys" is already gender neutral (i.e. it can be almost any ratio of genders of a group), and "guy" is suitable for someone with an unknown gender. A quick google will show that people are starting to ask the question "is guy gender netural?" so native speakers aren't so sure themselves anymore if it means strickly male or if it is more like the word "person". The word is probably going through the same sort of transition that "girl' did (which used to be a child of either gender a few 100s of years ago). Also, people since about the 70s have been trying to over correct for using "he" and "man" to mean someone of uknown gender and we still haven't converged on a solution, be it either to stop caring and call chairmen chairmen or to call a salesman a salesperson.

jan = man, woman, person of unknown gender, hermaphrodite, asexual-post-human-cyborg, etc.

What other word would it be? If "jan" already encodes a default gender, which one is it? More likely, "jan" means all of them. The tp way is that when a sentence or word can mean two or more things, it means all of them and it's the readers choice to pick from the alternatives.

[janKipo]

Well, the speaker is under an obligation to narrow the choices down as much as he can (sorry, that was the age I was raised in and it is hard to change). So, 'jan' is appropriate for humans and other great apes when gender is unknown or irrelevant, but when used with a gender specific term like 'meli' is does project some interesting implicatures: the first mentioned is probably not a great ape at all, but if she is, the second is either male or gender unknown, since there is a contrast of level to be accounted for. Further, there is the soweli, whose gender is irrelevant, apparently, which makes one wonder why the gender of the other non ape is relevant (or the gender of the first ape relevant), One could go on. Context will decide, we say, but the speaker is obligated to build as much context as he can so that we will decide correctly (without saying too much, of course -- another obligation).

For what it is worth, "guys" and "youse guys" especially is standard St Louis (and central and somewhat south Missouri) usage for waiters (of all sexes and genders) for any party of more than one, regardless of its make up on any demographic lines.