ИРОНИЯТА И АМБИВАЛЕНТНОСТТА КАТО ЕЗИКОВО-СПЕЦИФИЧНИ МЕХАНИЗМИ ЗА КОДИРАНЕ НА ЗНАЧЕНИЕ
IRONY AND AMBIVALENCE AS LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC MEANING CODING MECHANISMS

Summary/Abstract: The article offers an analysis of the similarities and differences between irony and am-bivalence. The two phenomena share the ability to be expressed in linguistic form; both of them most often rely on the oscillation between a positive and a negative meaning of a single word or expression. The difference between them is that virtually any word denoting a positive characteristic of a person can be used ironically, given that irony is contextually conditioned. No matter how often we use genius in the sense of mediocre or stupid, the ironic use will not evolve into a distinct sense of the polysemous word genius. Unlike irony, ambivalent meanings do not depend on the context of use in the same way and should be encoded in the dictionary. Thus, Bulgarian келеш “squirt; fop” is defined in the Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language (RBE 1977–) as “2. coll. contempt. usually as a form of address. A boy or a young man who is or seems to be inexperienced, unfit for something, but who is self-confident, arrogant, daring or wayward, headstrong. 3. rarely, iron. Used about a resourceful, deft, capable young man”. However, it is inaccurate to define these two senses as “contemptuous” and “ironic”. The first one is ambivalent and may hence imply contempt or ridicule, where-as the second one is, as the analysis shows, admiratively ambivalent and can express attitudes ranging from astonishment to envy resulting from prior underestimation of the qualities of the individual in question.

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