A Case Study Of English Ambivalent Words Within Event-domain Cognitive Model

When we look up the dictionary, we will find there are some interesting words. For example, the English word “admonish” includes two opposite meanings at the same time. One is “to tell somebody you do not approve something somebody has done”; the other is “to strongly suggest somebody to do something”. Other words like pretend, pride, employment and so on. Wang Yin(2006) defines this kind of words as ambivalent words. There are some other names can express this phenomenon, such as: auto-antonym, antiphrasis, Jesus Word and so on.Comparatively speaking the comprehensive research on ambivalent words is relatively scarce. So this thesis mainly tries to study this phenomenon within Event-domain Cognitive Models(ECM thereafter). Wang Yin(2006) defines the ambivalent words as there are two opposite meanings sharing the same word form. According to his definition, ambivalent words contain the typical features: opposite meanings, identical word forms. So we can conclude that ambivalent word has important relevance to three semantic relations: antonymy, homonymy and polysemy. Therefore, the three semantic sense relations are the theoretical foundations of this thesis.This thesis only studies the English ambivalent words. The author sets up a small corpus, which is made up by 196 ambivalent words from Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary(7th Edition), with the intention to illustrate how ECM functions in classifications and sense construction mechanisms of ambivalent words. This corpus can also strengthen the persuasion of the study from quantity analysis and qualitative description. Moreover, from the previous studies we can find that most scholars study the ambivalentwords without considering human subjective initiative, which plays an important role in language production, acceptation, construal and comprehension. This thesis aims to explore the intrinsic sense construction mechanism of the ambivalent words from human subjective initiative within Event-domain Cognitive Model, which is put forward by Wang Yin(2006).In this thesis we mainly study following queries:i. Why ambivalent words belong to a unique kind of polyseme?ii. What is the sense construction mechanism of ambivalent words?iii. How to put the conclusions of this study in polyseme teaching and translation activities?Theoretically speaking this paper not only enriches the connotation of Event-domain Cognitive Model, but also reflects its strong explanatory power. Besides, this thesis also provides a new aspect to explain the intrinsic forming reasons of the ambivalent words, which creates a new way to study them. From the application point, this study provides a more effective way to teach polysemes and translation activities. Above all, this study is equipped with theoretical and applied double importance.