Core Function Attestation

Theme: Grammar & syntax · 9 sentences.

CF-001 · Core Function Attestation

S126 la-mi to [go [lo-ra-ki-mu no-de ti-de] la-ki-pa-mu ki lo-pa-wi ti-de] My conceptual model: given no engine failure, the ship would have reached its destination.

Notes

pa-wi = place-will = destination. Head-final: wi (will/intent) is head; pa (place) modifies it as an intentional place — the place one is heading toward. First use; compound candidate (W088).
la-ki-pa-mu ki lo-pa-wi = the vehicle moves [toward] its destination. lo-pa-wi in the patient slot encodes the goal-state of movement: the motion event terminates at the destination. The goal-as-patient construction is not yet explicit in spec; it works by analogy with change-of-state constructions where the result of a process is in the patient slot.
no-de ti-de = no-decay at past-time = the decay event did not occur in the past. no-de as a compound predicate means "failure did not happen." The premise is non-actual: in reality the engine DID fail; the hypothetical premise inverts this.
Path A — what it achieves: The counterfactual is comprehensible and complete. The la-mi to [...] framing marks the scenario as a conceptual model held by the speaker. The non-actuality of the premise is implied by the framing: if the premise were actual, no epistemic wrapper would be needed — a bare factual conditional would suffice.
Path A — what it costs:
Mandatory first-person stance-holder (la-mi). The speaker necessarily claims personal ownership of the counterfactual model. For a historian, investigator, or narrator writing about someone else's past, the natural form would instead require la-to-fe-li to [...] (the investigators hold...) or la-[narrator] to [...] — always an explicit attributor. This reflects Tonesu epistemic culture: every claim is attributed. But it converts a non-actual conditional into an attributed assertion, which has a different illocutionary weight.
Epistemic weight mismatch. la-mi to [prop] = "I hold [prop] at knowledge level" — this asserts claim-strength. Counterfactuals in most discourse contexts don't assert anything about the speaker's epistemic state; they assert a causal relationship while flagging the premise as non-actual. Path A imports to's epistemic force inappropriately.
No structural separation of non-actuality and causal claim. The non-actuality of the premise is implied only by inference from the epistemic wrapper — not marked on the conditional itself. A reader must infer: "why is this inside to [...]? Because the premise is non-actual." This is indirect.

S127 la-mi to [go [lo-zo-li se lo-si ti-de] la-zo-li ka fe-si lo-li-pu ti-de] My conceptual model: given the person having perceived the signal, she would have issued a warning to the crew.

Notes

li-pu = plural-person = crew/collective. lo-li-pu = patient:collective = directed to the crew. The lo- particle on the recipient argument of ka fe-si marks the crew as both patient and target of the warning action.
fe-si = W024, warning signal — the content of the transmitted signal.
Path A — social domain problem exposed: The counterfactual here is not primarily about the speaker's epistemic model — it is an assertion about what would have happened in a third-party situation. But la-mi to [...] makes it a first-person epistemic claim: "I believe/model that..." A historian writing this investigation report is not inserting their personal model — they are reporting a counterfactual finding. The natural Tonesu form would attribute this differently: to the investigation body, not the speaker. Path A structurally conflates reasoning-about-the-world with claiming- about-oneself. The language cannot write an anonymous counterfactual historical assertion — every counterfactual carries its thinker.
Cultural note: This may not be a bug. Tonesu epistemic culture insists that all claims have attributors. An "anonymous" counterfactual assertion — one that makes a claim about what would have happened with no stated epistemic owner — is potentially a species of decontextualized authority claim. The language may be deliberately forcing the question: who is asserting this counterfactual? But this implies that counterfactuals in Tonesu discourse are always testimony, not neutral logic.

S128 la-mi to [go [lo-to-re-su to-fe-su-ki ti-de] lo-ne-fe de ti-de] My conceptual model: given [the doctrine having been published], the relational tension would have dissolved.

Notes

to-re-su = W064 (standing doctrine/policy). to-fe-su-ki = the inchoative publication event: the doctrine crosses the epistemic threshold to published to-su status. From semantic-map.md § Domain 6. Not yet in derived.md — compound candidate (add alongside pa-wi W088).
lo-ne-fe de ti-de = patient:relational-tension dissolves at past-time = the dispute was resolved. de (decay) as predicate on the tension: the tension dissolved. Clean and compositionally transparent.
Path A — institutional domain: worst case. The sentence now asserts "I, the speaker, hold as my conceptual model that the institutional causal chain would have produced this outcome." In formal institutional discourse — an arbitration ruling, a post-incident analysis, a legal brief — this personal framing (la-mi) is the wrong register entirely. The statement belongs to an investigation body, not a private mind. The institutional counterfactual assertion needs a third party as attributor, an institutional voice, not a personal first-person claim.
Path A verdict: The epistemic wrapper strategy works the best in personal reasoning contexts (S126 — the speaker reflecting on a situation they witnessed). It degrades in social testimony contexts (S127 — historical claim about third parties) and is structurally misaligned with institutional discourse (S128 — an arbiter's counterfactual analysis). The problem is not that Path A is wrong; it is that it is too strong — it collapses "I hold this as a personal model" with "this is an assertion about what would have happened." These should be distinguishable.

S129 to [go [lo-ra-ki-mu de ti-de] lo-ki-pa-mu pa-ki ti-de] In the conceptual/hypothetical domain: if the engine had failed, the ship would have drifted.

Notes

Grammar move attempted: to in the frame-setter role — the entire bracketed scenario is marked as non-actual/conceptual. No stance-holder (la-X) is named. The to [...] construction claims: "this is a conceptual scenario, not an asserted fact." Parallel to how go [X] introduces a causal frame without naming the causal agent: go sets the frame, and the internal clause fills it. By analogy, to [scenario] would set a hypothetical frame without naming a thinker.
Grammatical question: is to licensed as an impersonal frame-setter? All current corpus attestations of to require a la-X agent: la-mi to [prop] = "I hold [prop] as knowledge." The bare form to [prop] with no agent would require argument-drop — the "thinker" is left unspecified. Tonesu permits argument-drop in established contexts (speaker-drop la-mi, topic-drop, imperative-drop la-tu). This would be a new drop environment: thinker-drop in epistemic frame constructions.
Does to [X Y] internally disambiguate from predicate to? Yes, structurally. When to is a predicate, it takes a proposition as argument: la-X to [prop]. Bare to [full-scenario-with-internal-clause-structure] is distinguishable from a predicate use because (a) there is no la-X opening agent, and (b) the bracketed argument contains a full causal chain (go [clause] result) — not a noun or simple state. A parser would read bare to [go [...] ...] as a frame-setter, not as a headless predicate. The structure is available.
Path B verdict: Grammatically accessible through argument-drop, but requires formalizing a new drop environment (thinker-drop from epistemic frame). The resulting construction reads well but has a subtle problem: to [X] with no thinker still implies a thinker (the discourse-domain speaker). It suppresses the thinker without eliminating the epistemic weight. The non-actuality of the premise comes from inference ("this is in the conceptual domain, therefore it isn't being asserted as factual") rather than from explicit marking. This is weaker than desired — it marks the register as hypothetical but not the premise as non-actual. Useful as a register device; insufficient as a grammatical counterfactual marker.

S130 to-go [lo-ra-ki-mu de ti-de] lo-ki-pa-mu pa-ki ti-de Counterfactually: if the engine had failed, the ship would have drifted.

Notes

to-go = conceptual-causal = hypothetical-causal frame marker. Head-final: go (cause/origin) is the head — this IS a causal/conditional frame; to (conceptual pattern) modifies it as hypothetical/non-actual. The compound marks the entire conditional structure as non-actual: premise is non-actual, result is non-actual, the causal link between them is being asserted.
The structural operation: to-go [X] Y is to go [X] Y as a compound hypothetical-frame is to an actuality-neutral conditional. The to- prefix lifts the causal frame out of actuality-assertion and into conceptual/hypothetical space. go [X] Y can be read as present, future, or general conditional (actuality-neutral but not explicitly non-actual). to-go [X] Y explicitly asserts non-actuality: "the causal chain [X → Y] is held in the conceptual domain, not the actual one."
Advantages:
No stance-holder required. The counterfactual is not attributed to any speaker; it is an assertion about a causal relationship in non-actual space. The thinker is absent in the same way the causal agent is absent from go [X] Y: the frame sets the relation, not the attributor.
Compositionally grounded. to-go uses only existing roots with their established meanings. A reader who knows to (conceptual/pattern) and go (cause/conditional frame) can parse to-go without a glossary entry.
Extends the existing frame paradigm cleanly. The frame inventory already includes go, du, wi as clause-level frame markers. to-go is one new compound in the same paradigm, not a new category.
Marks non-actuality on the frame, not on the premise. The non-actuality is a property of the conditional structure itself, not of a time-expression or negation inside the premise. This is the right level: a counterfactual is non-actual as a whole, not just non-actual in the premise.
Disadvantages:
Introduces a new compound frame marker into the grammar. This must be explicitly registered. It is not a derived word in the usual sense — it functions like go as a structural particle, not like ra-ki-mu (a lexical compound). Its status (grammar rule vs. derived form) needs definition.
Does not distinguish counterfactual from future hypothetical. Both "if the engine were to fail, the ship would drift" (future hypothetical) and "if the engine had failed, the ship would have drifted" (past counterfactual) would use to-go [X] Y. The distinction between them would come from the internal time-marking (ti-de vs. no time-marker) in the premise and result clauses, not from the frame marker itself. This is arguably correct: the to-go frame marks non-actuality, and time-marking adds the past/future dimension independently. The two-axis system (non-actuality via to-go; time via ti compounds) is cleaner than a single frame that encodes both.

S131 to-go [lo-to-re-su to-fe-su-ki ti-de] lo-ne-fe de ti-de Counterfactually, given that the doctrine had been published, the relational tension would have dissolved.

Notes

The to-go frame removes all reference to any speaker's epistemic state. The sentence makes a bare counterfactual assertion about institutional causation: if doctrine-publication had occurred, the dispute would have dissolved. This is the register appropriate for an arbitration brief, a post-incident analysis, or a narrative history — the exact contexts where Path A (S128) degraded.
Contrast with S128 directly:
S128 (Path A): la-mi to [go [...]] = "I, the speaker, hold as my model that..."
S131 (Path C): to-go [...] = "In the counterfactual domain: [causal chain]"
S131 asserts the causal relationship in the counterfactual domain without any agent of assertion. It is structurally analogous to how English "If X had happened, Y would have followed" can be written in an investigation report without "I believe."
Generalization confirmed: to-go [X] Y works identically in engineering (S130), social (apply mentally — to-go [lo-zo-li se lo-si ti-de] la-zo-li ka fe-si lo-li-pu ti-de works), and institutional (S131) domains. No domain-specific friction.

S155 to-go [la-zo-li se lo-si ti-de] la-zo-li ka fe-si lo-li-pu ti-de Counterfactually: given that the person had received the signal, she would have issued the warning to the crew.

Notes

The social-domain Path C sentence sketched in the CF-001 verdict (to-go [lo-zo-li se lo-si ti-de] la-zo-li ka fe-si lo-li-pu ti-de) is committed here with one correction: premise uses la-zo-li (perspective-anchor agent) not lo-zo-li (patient-marker), consistent with all other se-perception clauses in corpus.
Direct comparison with S127 (Path A version of same event):
S127: la-mi to [go [lo-zo-li se lo-si ti-de] la-zo-li ka fe-si lo-li-pu ti-de]
S155: to-go [la-zo-li se lo-si ti-de] la-zo-li ka fe-si lo-li-pu ti-de The result clause is identical. The only structural difference is the removal of la-mi to [go [...]] and the substitution of to-go as the outer frame. S155 requires no speaker; S127 requires la-mi as the mandatory attributor.
Cross-domain generalization complete: S130 (engineering), S131 (institutional), S155 (social). to-go [X] Y works domain-independently, as the CF-001 verdict asserted.
li-pu = crew/collective. lo-li-pu = to:the-crew (recipient marked as patient). fe-si = W024 (warning signal). zo-li = organism-person (gender-neutral third party).

S156 la-to-fe-su to [to-go [la-zo-li se lo-si ti-de] la-zo-li ka fe-si lo-li-pu ti-de] The investigation body asserts as its model: had the person received the signal, she would have issued the warning to the crew.

Notes

First corpus attestation of the attributed counterfactual form: la-X to [to-go [premise] result]. The embedded proposition is S155; the outer clause assigns epistemic ownership to to-fe-su (the epistemic standards/investigation body, W072) rather than the speaker (la-mi).
This resolves the S127 illocutionary-weight problem directly. The CF-001 verdict diagnosed S127's defect: in a post-incident investigation report, the counterfactual claim belongs to the inquiry body, not to a private speaker's personal model. S156 uses la-to-fe-su to [...] — the investigation body owns the claim.
Force distinction, now corpus-attested: | Construction | Force | |---|---| | to-go [X] Y (S155) | bare counterfactual — no thinker asserted | | la-mi to [to-go [X] Y] (S127 Path A variant) | speaker's personal counterfactual model | | la-to-fe-su to [to-go [X] Y] (S156) | institutional counterfactual assertion |
Path A (la-X to [...]) continues to function, but the wrapper is now wrapping to-go [...] rather than go [...]. The attributed form is Path A wrapping Path C — exactly as the CF-001 verdict specified.

S157 to-go [lo-ra-ki-mu de] lo-ki-pa-mu pa-ki Were the engine to fail, the ship would drift. — Future hypothetical.

Notes

Minimal contrast pair with S130 (past counterfactual):
S130: to-go [lo-ra-ki-mu de ti-de] lo-ki-pa-mu pa-ki ti-de — past; ti-de in both premise and result
S157: to-go [lo-ra-ki-mu de] lo-ki-pa-mu pa-ki — future hypothetical; no ti-de The frame marker to-go is identical. The only difference is time-marking inside the clauses. The actuality-axis (to-go) and the temporal-axis (ti-de) are independent.
This provides the corpus evidence for the two-axis design claim that previously only had spec-level illustration. to-go is now attested for both the past-counterfactual and future-hypothetical readings.
The untensed/unmarked form is prospective (future-open) by default: lo-ra-ki-mu de = engine decays [in the hypothetical scenario, prospectively], with no time-location asserted.
S157 is also the minimal engineering-domain future hypothetical — appropriate for safety analysis: "if X were to fail under future operating conditions, Y would follow."

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