OK, serious #grammar question. Toki Pona has a number of grammatical morphemes which mark

• a verb's object (e);
• a complex NP or DP (if you count pronouns and numerals separately from nouns; there are no articles, possessors are adjectival) as an attribute of an NP/DP or VP (pi);
• an ordinal numeral as an attribute of an NP (nanpa).

These all look to me like functional heads taking an NP/DP as a complement. For this reason, I'd (naively?) propose classifying them as prepositions of a "functional" kind.

However, this suggestion has been met with resistance and criticism on the grounds that

• the textbook doesn't classify them as prepositions (this is dogmatism and thus a weak argument, IMO);
• different from prepositions (lon 'in, at, on', tawa 'to, towards', etc.) they have no lexical meaning;
• as a consequence, they can't be negated;
• different from prepositions they can occur in subject NPs—PPs are restricted to adverbials and predicative contexts.

So, what gives? Which other category besides "(functional) preposition" should they be assigned to if I want to avoid the very broad label "particle" since all grammatical morphemes are classified as "particles" by the textbook, also those in the clausal/verbal domain (la, li, o)?

#syntax #linguistics #conlang #tokipona

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