Testing Ground

For a while now I’ve been trying to apply my knowledge of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG; Kaplan & Bresnan 1982; most recently Dalrymple 2023; for a quick overview, see e.g. Müller 2023: 223–246; Belyaev 2023a) to Toki Pona (Lang 2014; 2021) in order to analyze its constituent structure. LFG’s constraint-based approach seems like an overall useful way to describe syntactic structures, even in a totally isolating language like Toki Pona. Especially the fact that Toki Pona all but lacks morphology makes this a nice brain-teaser. You can find the working draft of what’s by now grown into a whole treatise on Codeberg. And while I’ve come pretty far since I started this project during the 2024/25 Christmas break, the construction usually referred to as a “la phrase” keeps bothering me in the back of my mind. So let me explain in order to sort out my own thoughts. ...

With my dissertation off the table, I guess I needed something new to delve into. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, during the summer, Toki Pona has struck my fancy. After about three months of casual practice, it looks like I can produce mostly grammatical sentences. I’m also growing in my ability to understand others’ written sentences, which can be challenging, because, within the domain of content words, there are no hard part-of-speech boundaries. Think “the old man the boat” or “the horse raced past the barn fell,” except as a general feature of the language, though with arguably better ways to tell subject and object apart than in English. ...