second thoughts on Nkinis

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:35 PM -0800 12/22/04, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>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?

I can't say--but I'm not sure whether it's because I've forgotten or never knew

>-- but i never heard a
>thing about word patenting.
>
and as I'm sure Arnold and a couple of other old-timers will recall,
it wasn't Raising for Rosenbaum (in the "core grammar" model),
but...(wait for it)...IT-REPLACEMENT.  So I guess, in retrospect, it
wasn't the *name* "Raising" that was patented, but the process itself.

larry