Toki Pona Wikipedia has been formally approved!
we are preparing to move over to the tok.wikipedia.org domain soon

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Toki_Pona_2

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OK, serious #grammar question. Toki Pona has a number of grammatical morphemes on the left edge of an NP 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)?

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Edit: They're maybe better characterized as determiners, I guess? Either as DP heads + nominal complement or in Spec, except that still doesn't seem to fit well with pi as marking complex attribution of a verb.

#syntax #linguistics #conlang #tokipona

new #TokiPona course just* dropped
https://wasona.com/

*actually dropped a while back, i just read my RSS really slowly