The Cognitive Construal Of Contronyms

It is an indisputable fact that a word is monosemic when it was first coined. With the development of the world, the polymerization of words is inevitable. An alien ubiquitous phenomenon that two opposite meanings happily coexist in one word has been noticed and contronym is generally accepted as a sub-category of polysemy. Contronym has long been studied by some scholors in English circle, who focus on citing examples to bring this phenomenon to public attention. Studies on their motivations in different dimensions contribute a lot to our understanding of contronyms, and the consensus that meaning extension is the fundamental reason has been reached. Literature shows that little attention has been paid to cognitive analysis of contronym. The author ventures to analyze contronyms from a totally new cognitive dimension.This thesis employs the construal devices proposed by Talmy and Langacker to illustrate different kinds of contronyms and makes a new classification of them. The analysis proves that cognitive construal can provide a good explanation for contronyms, the construal device of specificity perfectly explains the generic nominal contronyms, prominence serves as the mechanism of relational verbal contronyms, perspective construal corresponds to those directional verbal contronyms, and scope reveals the motivation of affective adjective or adverbial contronyms. The categorical analysis on the motivation of contronyms indicates that category, though based on the prototype, is characterized by fuzziness, interactivity and the unity, which elucidate the categorical tolerance of semantic oppositeness in contronyms.Study finds that contronyms have two distinctive features:(1) markedness and internal semantic asymmetry;(2) conflict of the cognitive economy principle and semantic ambiguity. The ambiguity addressed by contexts and contronyms can facilitate our communication and arouse our language learning interest. This thesis is to elaborate contronyms from cognitive construal and category perspectives, and discuss their characteristics and values in communication and language teaching and learning.