Part 1: One machine, three scopes

The doctrine lives in manual ch9; here is the working shape, once, and then we practice. Phi sorts its grammar by scope: how much of the sentence a particle governs decides where it stands.

The sentence formula, with everything in place:

[Slot 0] [Subject] [Slot 2 + Object] [Slot 1 stack] [Verb]

And the shape rule from ch8 §2 rides underneath it all: every one of these is a bare CV syllable, which is why you can sort a Phi sentence by ear before you know what any word means: the one-syllable words are the grammar, and the grammar always announces.

The unmarked defaults

Half the system's elegance is what absence means. No particle is ever mandatory filler; every silence is a meaning:

• No Slot 0 particle: a declarative statement.
• No tense: present.
• No aspect: simple, no claim about the action's internal shape.
• No evidential: a plain assertion, the fact claimed, no source named (canon: the unmarked sentence claims no source; hi claims witnesshood explicitly).
• No modal: actual, not possible or necessary.
• No negation: it happened.

So the simplest sentence is already complete: mia thia nila. — I see you. Present, plain, positive, unframed. Everything a particle adds is a departure from that resting state, chosen and audible.

One per rank

Canon's newest structural ruling closes the system: each Slot 1 rank admits at most one particle per clause: one tense, one aspect, one source, one modal, with a single ruled pairing inside voice (se ka, Part 4). You never choose which two aspects; you choose the aspect or add a clause. Two sources are two sentences. Complexity in Phi goes into more clauses, not thicker stacks, and every stack you will ever read obeys one fixed order (Part 6).

The machine at work

ch9 §6 grows one sentence layer by layer; here is its finished form, the whole system in nine words:

pi wa mia ha lo melu so po nila.
POL Q 1SG PROX PL friend FUT POT see.
(Might I please see these friends?)

Slot 0 twice (pi wa: politeness first, always), the subject, a Slot 2 stack on the object (ha lo melu: deixis before plural, by the cline), the Slot 1 stack (so po: tense before modality, by the ranks), the verb. Read it aloud left to right and notice that nothing surprises you: every piece announced itself before its content arrived, which is the entire design, at every scale, all the way down.

Drill: sort by ear

Cover the table above. For each particle, say its slot aloud, fast, no thinking: ma, wa, lo, so, ne, pi, ki, ru, lu, se, nu, ho, we, na, ha.

Answers: 1, 0, 2, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2. If any cost you a beat, the tell is scope: does it frame the sentence, shape the verb, or touch one word? Run it again tomorrow; Part 6 assumes this is reflex.