This post is about @lipamanka's analysis of toki pona. I'll address the broader points about linguistics separately
Thank you for the derivational patterns! If you have any data from your listing of which sequences work and which don't, I would love to see it, because I am interested in developing an analysis that doesn't overgenerate as much or at least prevents infinite loops.
I'm probably also gonna go back and look at all the judgments people have made about various sentences in this thread and the other one from the point of view of this analysis at some point.
Let me for the purposes of the next section split this in two, as V →p N for the patient and V →e N for the event
Let me split this as V →e A for relating to the event and V →a A for being the agent.
Then, having both V →e N and V →e A seems redundant to me, you can make one from the other with A→N and N→A. I think this hints that a simpler analysis should be possible.
I have become convinced of this analysis!
This all works in accordance with that analysis too, very nice.
Likewise this. As well as the responses from @cosmicPython's response and @selxehe's response.
These are derived as V→N, and the two different V→A, right?
I think you can analyse "mi pakala e nasin toki" as a transitive verb, and "nasin toki li pakala" either as lifting the adjective "pakala" into a verb A→V "making something be broken" or derive it from the transitive verb "pakala" as V →p N → A → V "making something be having the qualities of something someone has broken".
Again two different derivations with practically identical meaning, indicating the possibility for simplification; in this case we might be able to say that "pakala" is only a transitive verb? More generally, we can probably also dissolve the distinction between nouns and adjectives, and end up with two lexical categories of "single place predicates" and "two-place predicates" to use some loglangy terms for them. Along the lines of this: