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Chapter One Introduction

1.1. Research Object
When we look up the dictionary, we will find there are some very interesting words. For example, the English word “adm onish” has two opposite meanings one is “to tell somebody you do not approve of what somebody has done”, the other is “to strongly propose somebody to do something”. There are m any other words be longing to this kind, such as: rent, pride, booty and so on. W ang Yin (2006) defines these words as am bivalent words, which m eans there are two opposite meanings sharing the same word forms. The word “ambivalence” is composed by the Latin prefix “ambi-” which means “on both sides” (Pearsall, J. 2001: 53) and the root valence, which is from the Latin word valentia. It means be worthy , be valuable. Ambivalent means human having mixed feelings or contradictory attitudes towards som ething or someone. Ambivalence is a state of having simultaneous conflicting reactions, beliefs, or id eas about some objects. Stated it in another way, ambivalence is the experience of having an attitude towards someone or something that contains both positively and negatively valenced components. The term also refers to situations where mixed feelings are experienced, or where a person under goes uncertainty or indecisiveness (from BNC). The psychological literature has been distinguished between several different forms of a mbivalence. One, often felt am bivalent, represents the psychological experience of conflict (af fective manifestation), mixed feelings, m ixed reactions (cognitive m anifestation), and ind ecision (behavioral m anifestation) in the evaluation of some objects (from BNC).
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1.2. Research Purpose
Hegel (1821) says what is reasonable is real; th at which is real is reasonable. So it is necessary for us to find out existing reasons about am bivalent words. Through detailed analysis of definition of antonym, homonym and polyseme, we can conclude that ambivalent word is a unique kind of polysem e. Albeit, they exist in English with a sm all number, there are still some scholars trying their best to explain the ambivalent words from different points. Most are journal articles only e xplaining it from one aspect. This thesis attem pts to use the Event-domain Cognitive Model to explain th is phenomenon from comprehensive aspects. Event-domain Cognitive Model has great exp lanatory power to the intrinsic forming reasons of ambivalent words not only taking our hor izontal but also v ertical thinking into consideration. It conc ludes both sta tic and dyn amic perspectives. We will ta lk about it in Chapter Three. By analyzing the cognitive intrinsic forming reasons within Event-dom ain Cognitive Model, and synthesizing the semantic relationship based on converse relation between the two opposite senses in the ambivalent w ords, this paper tries to answer the following questions: why ambivalent words belong to a unique kind of polyseme? What is the sense construction mechanism of ambivalent