Re: le/lo

[Robin Turner <robin@BILKENT.EDU.TR>]

As a beginner I am not sure about the subtleties of the le/lo debate, but I
feel obliged to comment on the metonymy issue.  I don't think it is OK to
use "lo xunre" to mean "the woman with the red handbag", though "le xunre"
would be fine.  I appreciate the point that we can use metonymy to infer
the intended meaning, but I think the whole point of "lo" is that it
precludes metaphor or metonymy as far as is humanly possible.  "lo xunre"
means "that which really is red", while "le xunre" means "that which I call
'red'", possibly because I am using metonymy.  Because we use metonymy and
metaphor so much (usuallly without being aware of it, as Lakoff and Johnson
so admirably point out),  "le" is best seen as the unmarked form; we would
be better off using "lo" only when we specifically want to say that as far
as we know, the referent of the sumti _really_ is what we say it is, and
not something metaphorically or metonymically associated with it.  Another
way of putting it might be "For the purposes of this conversation, I wish
to adopt an objectivist paradigm in which there are definite entities which
correspond to specific words, and I assert that the entity in question
really does correspond to this word."  Phew!


Robin Turner

Bilkent Universitesi,
IDMYO,
Ankara,
Turkey.

<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8309>