| Like the "synonymy","antonymy" and "polysemy", ambivalent words are universal language phenomena. Ambivalent words refer to one word with two opposite or contrast meanings. Although researchers have paid much attention on ambivalent words, the studies of ambivalent words are strikingly sterile. It is in this background that the thesis is based on the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics and study the motivation and mechanism of ambivalent words.The ambivalent words in English are the objects to study in this thesis. We choose the ambivalent words in Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary (6th Edition, The Commercial Press Oxford University Press) to build a small corpus. The thesis focuses on the following questions:(1) What are the classifications of ambivalent words?(2) How does metaphoric mechanism motivate ambivalent words?(3) How does metonymic mechanism motivate ambivalent words?According to the metaphorical and metonymic mechanism in cognitive linguistics the study concludes that some ambivalent words are influenced by structural metaphor, orientational metaphor and ontological metaphor. There are also some ambivalent words which are affected by the metonymic mechanism. Lakoff and Turner point out that metonymy is the mapping process of two conceptual entities in the same cognitive domain. For the same object or the same matter, people may have different experience; hence, their cognitive approaches and understandings are different. From the analysis, we can easily find that, metaphor and metonymy are two important methods for the formation of ambivalent words. At last, the thesis gets the conclusion that, under the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics, ambivalent words are influenced by metaphorical mechanism and metonymic mechanism. Ambivalent words are the result of the interactive relationship between human cognition and the reality of the world. |
