waso Kasen<p>OK, serious <a href="https://mastodon.de/tags/grammar" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>grammar</span></a> question. Toki Pona has a number of grammatical morphemes on the left edge of an NP which mark</p><ul><li>a verb's object (<em>e</em>);</li><li>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 (<em>pi</em>);</li><li>an ordinal numeral as an attribute of an NP (<em>nanpa</em>).</li></ul><p>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.</p><p>However, this suggestion has been met with resistance and criticism on the grounds that</p><ul><li>the textbook doesn't classify them as prepositions (this is dogmatism and thus a weak argument, IMO);</li><li>different from prepositions (<em>lon</em> 'in, at, on', <em>tawa</em> 'to, towards', etc.) they have no lexical meaning;</li><li>as a consequence, they can't be negated;</li><li>different from prepositions they <em>can</em> occur in subject NPs—PPs are restricted to adverbials and predicative contexts.</li></ul><p>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 <em>all</em> grammatical morphemes are classified as "particles" by the textbook, also those in the clausal/verbal domain (<em>la</em>, <em>li</em>, <em>o</em>)?</p><p>==========</p><p>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.</p><p><a href="https://mastodon.de/tags/syntax" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>syntax</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.de/tags/linguistics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>linguistics</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.de/tags/conlang" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>conlang</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.de/tags/tokipona" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>tokipona</span></a></p>