Abstract：Sentence utterance synonymy is distinguishable from syntactic synonymy in that the former is the meaning relationship constructed by sentence utterances with the same communicative function in language use and the latter is the meaning relationship established by sentences with the same proposition in the language system. This paper examines sentence utterance synonymy from a cognitive pragmatic approach. It finds that sentence utterance synonymy is constructed in the process of dynamic meaning construal in the cognitive context, and its construction is constrained within the domain of the same conceptual structure, and more importantly, it demonstrates that sentence utterance synonymy is constructed centrally in connection with the speaker’s intention with the cognitive pragmatic properties like salience, viewpoint, and subjectivity manifested in the process of its construction. This study goes beyond the traditional semantics in ex- plaining syntactic synonymy in the language system and meanwhile it reveals the interaction of cognition and pragmatics.
Key words: grammatical structure; sentence utterance synonymy; cognitive pragmatics
