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John: > And Rosta scripsit: > > > The meaning/effect of zi'o itself turns out to be a tad controversial. > > What is the controversy? > > > According to me, it serves to redefine the selbri so that it needn't > > express a relation in which the zihoed place plays a part. > > And according to me. To be precise, zi'o provides the operation of the > relational algebra called "projection", whereby an n-place relation > becomes an (n-1)-place relation. The controversial issue is whether it must express a relation in which the zihoed place does not play a part. Take intransitive English verbs "swallow", "read", "watch". Intrans "swallow" does not entail "swallow something"; the object has uncontroversially been zihoed. But intrans "read" and "watch" mean "read something" and "watch it"; the object is syntactically unexpressed, but is semantically present; can we say that the object has been zihoed here? Certainly there is nothing strange about participants that are not syntactically expressed: the verb "fence" has no syntactic argument expressing the foil, the verb "steal" has no syntactic argument expressing the law contravened, etc. etc. Among the gismu, many more things are made of material or happen under conditions or are evaluated by some standard than actually have sumti places for those things. This is discussed on the wiki under "methods of resolving mismatches between place structures and number of overt sumti", which provides crucial context for the debate. The essence of the controversy is whether "broda be zi'o" must have a meaning that is not necessarily false if "broda be no da" is true, or whether that is simply one way of interpreting "broda be zi'o" among other possible alternatives. --And.