Is it possible to refer to an a parent element and modify its attributes?

Say I have a ul with some links in it:

ul
li
SomeText
a href="..."Link/a
/li
/ul


Now I want to change the color of SomeText depending on if a is hovered. (My
problem is more complicated than this so don't take this example at face
value... I know its easy to solve here but that is not what I'm asking)

so if I do something like

ul li a:hover
{

}

Then the style references everything in a. is there any way to tell it to
reference li instead?

I know in this example I can do it easy but in my problem I have nested ul's
and I need to change the color of a link in the first list when there is a
hover over a link in the second list(which is a sub list).

So essentially I want to change the color of a link when a completely
disjoint link is highlighted.

Is it possible with css?

Thanks,
Jon