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On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 11:02 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote: > Jorge Llambías, On 15/08/2012 23:43: > > > > Is "zo'e" consistent with the aims of the project? I was thinking all > > arguments had to be explicit, and I would expect most predicates would > > have only one argument, many would have two, and very few three or > > more arguments. > > Maybe zo'e in all its vagueness shouldn't be what can be implicit, but the > aims of the project include maximizing concision, which usually entails > making best use of zero phonological expression. > > A further advantage of implicit arguments for your scheme is that you only > need to use up an explicit vowel on a variable that is going to appear at > least twice. Every variable used as an argument is normally going to appear at least three times: once with the quantifier, at least once in the restricting clause, and at least once in the quantified predicate. Anomalous cases where the restricting clause or the quantified clause don't include the variable should be rare. Assuming there's one default quantifier/scope that can be omitted, I would still need the variable in the predicate for morphological reasons, to indicate where the predicate word ends. Some variables could come with a pre-defined quantifier/scope that can be omitted. For example if the predicate "mslf" means "x1 is me" and "rslf" means "x1 is you" then we could reserve the variables "a'a" and "e'e" to be bound by default with [la'a mslfa'a] and [le'e rslfe'e] so that we can just say "tvla'ake'e" instead of "la mslfa le rslfe tvlake" for "I talk to you". But I wouldn't omit variables from the predicate itself. mu'o mi'e xorxes