History: zi'oi

Source of version: 1 (current)

Considered obsolete for reasons given at foot of page. --((And)) ---- Although zi'oi doesn't specify which argument places are annulled, this can easily be guessed at by interlocutors. The rationale for this is that it should be easier to annull excess argument places without calling attention to them by filling them with zi'o. My idea is that if zi'oi were used scrupulously it would serve to indicate which gismu have a surfeit of sumti places and should be pruned. If it was then felt that usage had pruned the superfective places, with a concomitant change in the official definition, then texts written using zi'oi could easily be edited to delete {zi'oi}s. --AndR. John Cowan responded: IIRC we actually considered this solution, but abandoned it in favor of the sumti-based zi'o. To which And replies: The zi'o solution has the virtue of being explicit, and the vice of being a fatally counterintuitive method of achieving its primary aim, which is to axe sumti places that oughtn't to have been there in the first place. ---- ((And|I)) don't think that any zihooid solution to the problem of unwanted places is going to work. (For further discussion, see ((methods of resolving mismatches between place structures and number of overt sumti)).) Personally, I find myself happy to use rafsi ''zil'', but unhappy to use ''zi'o'', because it draws attention to places that one wants to neglect. Since ''zi'oi'' doesn't fix that underlying problem, I'll deem its proposal obsolete.