linguistics question: why do sentence diagrams put the verb at the top?
we are (because special interest) futzing around with diagramming toki pona sentences, and it occurs to us that we don't know why that convention.
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@packbat generally the verb is considered the one thing that no sentence can do without
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@Felthry that seems to be the consensus - we're mostly curious as to why
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@packbat Well, try to come up with a sentence that doesn't have a verb in it
it's not really possible, except as a response to a question, and then you can argue that the verb is implicit
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@Felthry depending on the analysis, "jan li lon tomo" has no verb, because "lon" is a preposition. it literally means "person inside building", no action specified.
...but that does depend on the analysis, because some tokiponists will say "lon" is both verb and preposition. there isn't a consensus on it.
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@packbat yeah, it's expressing a state of being, so it's a copula. Whether to count that as an implicit verb or not is a matter of debate, but it's definitely a special case--even in languages like english where it's an explicit verb it has some very unique properties
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@Felthry yeah, toki pona doesn't have a copula verb - that kind of sentence is usually analyzed as using the verb spot for the thing the subject is. so, "jan li pona" says that a person is gooding, and that's understood to meam the person is good.
it didn't occur to us to analyze sentences like "jan li lon tomo" as copulas - that's interesting!
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