second thoughts on Nkinis

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Dec 22, 2004, at 9:48 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:

> ...In our own world, more or less, Arnold or someone else may recall
> the
> rumor that the IBM-based syntactician Peter Rosenbaum had patented
> "Raising", so that every time someone else mentioned the rule--or, we
> liked to think after one too many tokes of banana peel, every time
> someone said something of the form "I believe John to have kissed
> Mary" or "A unicorn seems to be approaching" [yes, those were both
> considered instances of Raising back then]--Rosenbaum would demand a
> couple of cents.

i never heard the rumor.

peter was in my class at MIT and lived more or less across the street
from me in cambridge.  Raising was in his dissertation, but who knows
where the name came from; peter talked at length about his work with
(among others) haj ross, david perlmutter, tom bever, and me.  we
eventually lost contact -- what happened to him? -- but i never heard a
thing about word patenting.

arnold