Subject: RE:sumti raising

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 11:12:56 EDT

I think that the cases cited are not real problems for sumti raising as they 
stand. It is probable that, if someone's acts deceive you that someone 
exists and that, therefore, there is someone who(se act) deceives you. The 
problem comes when the place of the predicate moves into another world, 
whether of dreams or hopes or literature or what have you and the person 
whose acts are involved may not exist at all in the outer world of discourse. 
Then you don't want to be able to go from the fact that you dream of 
someone's acts to you dream of someone to there is someone you dream of. 
So, here sumti raising has to be marked. Then, for logical consistency, it 
has to be marked in other places where it occurs. But, as somone (&? xorxes? 
that kind of mind anyhow) has pointed out, it is hard to know where to stop, 
for it is not someone's acts that deceive me but my interpretation of that 
act and so, ought the {le nu ko'a zukte} be flagged as raised. And so on 
forever. In practice, we mainly flag references to concrete individuals 
(abstract ones seem to exist whether or not they occur) and we don't 
criiticize the absence of {tu'a} except where it makes a difference of the 
logical sort (individuals are events after all, though real only when they 
occur).