Part 2: Slot 0: framing
Slot 0 is where a sentence declares what kind of act it is, before one word of content. Five intents and one dress: wa asks, no requests, lu supposes, su hopes, pi softens whichever of them it wraps. Absence is the sixth option and the commonest: no frame, plain statement.
pi wa thia towe nai. POL Q 2SG well be. (Are you well? — politely asked) su theula towe nai. OPT UNIV well be. (May all be well.) lu thia naphe. mia towe phaelo. COND 2SG help. 1SG well feel. (If you help, I feel well.)
Politeness is the outermost frame
When Slot 0 particles combine, pi comes first, always (pi wa, pi no, pi su), and ch21 §2 gives the reason in one line: respect is the outermost frame, wrapped around even the sentence's own speech-act. The listener hears care before they hear what kind of sentence is coming, which is the modifier-first principle applied to feelings.
pi su thia towe nai. POL OPT 2SG well be. (I hope, respectfully, that you are well.)
The irrealis: lu he
lu alone supposes something real or likely; lu he supposes against the world: counterfactuals, roads not taken. he exists only here, canon-bound to lu:
lu he mia to naphe. shia to ma wepu. COND IRR 1SG PST help. 3SG PST NEG go. (If I had helped — but I didn't — they would not have left.)
What Slot 0 does not do
Two boundary notes worth fixing early. First, the intents do not stack with each other: the corpus never asks a wish or commands a question: a sentence performs one speech-act, and pi is the only particle that dresses another. (pi lu itself is unattested; nobody has yet needed a polite if.) Second, kona is not Slot 0, however sentence-initial it looks: the vocative stands outside the sentence entirely, its own little utterance with its own period (ch21 §1, the naming pamphlet). kona melu. wa thia towe nai. is a call and then a framed sentence: two acts, two periods.
Deep coverage elsewhere
Each frame has its own literature now: wa and the questions that need no wa are the punctuation pamphlet, part 2; su has lothea thole entirely to itself (one text, twenty-three su); no's gentleness is ch10 §5. This part's job is only the system: five intents, one dress, politeness first, absence meaningful.
Drill: one thought, five frames
Take thia sulopa pilewa. (you make soup) and reframe it aloud: as a question; a request; a condition with a consequence of your own; a wish; then the polite question and the polite request. Check yourself:
wa thia sulopa pilewa.2.no sulopa pilewa.(the subject rests: requests address their doer) 3.lu thia sulopa pilewa. mia seniku.4.su thia sulopa pilewa.Odd as a wish? Then feel why: hoping aloud about someone's soup-making is a strange spend ofsu. The strangeness is the drill working: frames are not decorations, they are claims about why you are speaking. 5.pi wa thia sulopa pilewa.6.pi no sulopa pilewa.