My intellectual crush on Toki Pona has kept me busy for the whole past year. Because why stop it with the linguisticksing when leaving the office, eh? As mentioned previously on this blog, I’ve been working off-hours on an analysis of its not quite so simple syntax. After three thorough revisions of the text now, I’m halfway confident that the survey contains mostly sensible analyses that are reasonably argued, and I hope intelligibly so. 😅

You can view and download the manuscript in its current form in PDF format at the repo on Codeberg. Note that despite giving my best, the manuscript hasn’t been properly peer-reviewed or otherwise edited by anyone else than me, at least not so far, so errors are all mine. I certainly can’t answer everything anyone could ever want to know about Toki Pona syntax, let alone how to let computers parse sentences automatically. For all intents and purposes, this is a sketch, even if it’s a rather elaborate one, which reflects the extent of my own current understanding of these matters.

One thing I’ve left out of the discussion in the survey because it more concerns the syntax–semantics interface of the lexicon (from an LFG point of view, at least) is the structural mapping of semantic roles to syntactic arguments (see Findlay et al. 2023 for an overview). Importantly, it should be possible to use Lexical Mapping Theory to explain why primary prepositions used as transitive verbs acquire a causative meaning, as in mi tawa e tomo ‘I move the building’ (transitive), compared to the simple agentive reading of the subject pronoun in mi tawa tomo ‘I’m going home/to the building’ (intransitive). Off the top of my head, this effect can be attributed to increasing valency. I hope to discuss this issue in more detail at a different time.

References

  • Findlay, Jamie Y., Roxanne Taylor & Anna Kibort. 2023. Argument structure and mapping theory. In Mary Dalrymple (ed.), Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar (Empirically Oriented Theoretical Morphology and Syntax 13), 699–778. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10185966 (🔓).
  • Kaplan, Ronald M. & Joan Bresnan. 1982. Lexical-functional grammar: A formal system for grammatical representation. In Joan Bresnan (ed.), The mental representation of grammatical relations (MIT Press Series on Cognitive Theory and Mental Representation), 173–281. Cambridge: MIT Press. [Worldcat]1

  1. What the duck, it looks like you’ll have to be logged into an account at Worldcat now to directly access entries. I suppose this is to thwart unrestrained scraping by LLMs, as things regrettably are now. 😓 ↩︎