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Jorge Llamb�as, On 15/09/2012 17:23:
On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 11:43 PM, And Rosta<and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:For "X knows Y to be the case", and other factive predicates, Y occurs in the same world as the knowing. For "X believes Y to be the case", Y does not necessarily occur in the same world as the believing. Perception verb complements can have either interpretation: "She saw a tiger approaching through the long grass" -- on one reading, there's a tiger approaching through the long grass, and she see this happening; on another reading, she's hallucinating, or maybe it's not a tiger but just a largeish cat. For know/believe you could argue that the predicate specifies whether or not its own event argument is necessarily in the same world as its x2; but you wouldn't want to say that for perception verbs, unless for every perception verb you had two versions, the knowy version and the believey version.That seems like a different issue from whether a tiger in a film can be said to be a tiger or not.
Yes. I know you and Mike are asking whether a tiger in a film is a tiger, but I on the other hand am arguing for having one device for saying it is a tiger in the same world as the spectator (which doesn't rule out it being imaginary, if the world contains imaginary tigers) and another device for saying it is a tiger but not necessarily in the same world as the spectator
It seems to me that "she saw (what she thought was) a tiger" is not very different from "she was talking to (who she thought was) John", even if this is more common with perception verbs.
If you'd said "She was talking *about* (who she thought was) John", I'd agree. That has two readings: John is such that she was talking about him. [John in same world as talking] She was talking about there being John. [John not necessarily in same world as talking] In the case of "she saw what she thought was a tiger", that is one reading of "She saw a tiger" (e.g. "She saw in the swirl of cloud a tiger; whereas in the same swirl of cloud he saw a motorbike"). As for "she was talking to who she thought was John" I can't get that reading for "She was talking to John" (except in Free Indirect Style, where the narrator is describing the world as the subject perceives it to be). An interesting but separate question is how to deal with the predicate "X talks to who X thinks is Y" -- it's easy enough to do as a full phrase,, but if it were a single predicate, I think I'd do it as a triadic predicate "X talks to Y who X thinks is Z", where Z is one of those arguments susceptible to the +/-necessarily-same-world contrast. --And.