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. 😅 ...
The below discussion is outdated. For a significantly more differentiated analysis, refer to Chapter 7 of the full survey (2026-02-15). 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. ...