this is roughly the vein of the breakthrough i came under after reading this thread, mainly influenced by being a tokiponist who is learning toaq now!
realizing that toaq seems to prefer promoting verbs into nouns by making the noun be the subject of the verb:
e.g. kıa “to be red” > kía “the red one(s)”, kueqtua “to collect” > kúeqtua “the collector(s)”,
i then realized that toki pona seemingly would do the opposite, aside from being able to abstract the verb in the same way an OOP language like Python can treat methods:
palisa “to be like a stick” > “a stick”, moku “to eat” > “food” (something that is eaten)
(in the process of realizing this, it also helped me realize that sitelen is more than something that is seen and kute is more than something that hears ahah)
non-copular verbs, from my experience, seem to applicational in a few ways:
causing an action (these examples are copular, but this seems like it can also allow for non-copular ones with implicit objects)
sina suwi e pan “you will sweeten the dough”, “you cause the dough to be sweet”; soweli li moku e kasi “animals eat plants”, “animals cause plants to be eaten”; ni li pakala e nasin “this broke the bridge”, “this causes the path to be broken”
causing the presence of (i.e. applying) a noun:
ona li sijelo e ilo mi “they bumped into my boat” (credit to lipamanka for the idea), “they applied a body to my tool”; sina moku ala moku e sike ni “did you put peanut butter on this ball?”, “did you apply food to this ball?”; jan li kiwen e akesi “the people are stoning the dragon”, “the people are applying stones to the dragon”
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