Subject: RE: zi'o and modals

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 09:19:09 EDT

{zi'o} first came to marked attention on this list when somneone notice that 
the definition of {botpi} "bottle" involved a content and a cap, which a 
bottle by the side of the road typically lacked. So what was that bottle? 
Not exactly {botpi} since that gave an unspecified content, cap (and made-of 
material) nor {botpi noda fo noda} since it didn't contain nothing, just air 
and maybe a little water, neither of which was relevant to its being a 
bottle. So, in place of the set of four-tuples <object, content, material, 
cap> that was the referent class of {botpi}, we looked for a two-tuple <
object, material> that would work for "bottle" as in English. And the way to 
name that relation was just to get rid of the references to content and cap: 
{zi'o} . Clearly, for any a,c such that <a,b,c, d> satisfies {botpi} , <a,c>
satisfies {botpi zi'o fo zi'o}.
Equally obviously, the converse does not hold: that bottle by the side of the 
road has neither content nor cap and so satisfies the elided predicate but 
not the full one. Similarly, {klama fi zio zi'o} is a new predicate, 
referencing a new relation, that is perhaps only incidentally related to 
{klama} in th sense outline above for {botpi}. It may be a mistake to even 
thing of it as a going. But it is more general only in the sense that more 
cases may fall under it, not that by itself it expresses a generalization of 
behavior.