On Pragmatic Near-synonymous Sentences in Chinese

The implementation of manual and automated evaluations for HSK Level 6 abbreviated writing entail an elaborate concept of pragmatic near-synonymy, pertaining to assessment of retelling, paraphrasing and read-to-write tasks, the training of listening and reading comprehension together with the design of the corresponding question items, the training in speaking, writing and rhetoric, and natural language processing in connection with retelling.However, only scant attention has been given to the issue in past studies of grammar, rhetoric, semantics and pragmatics.In order to establish the notion of pragmatic near-synonymous sentence, distinctions must be drawn between a sentence and an utterance, sentence meaning and utterance meaning, semantic synonymy and pragmatic synonymy, and near-synonymy in proposition and in pragmatic import, and the clause must be taken as the basic unit of analysis.Pragmatic near-synonymous sentences refer to those clause pairs possessing near-equivalent pragmatic import arising from a genuine or an extended context, and their identification is facilitated with recourse to abstract grammatical, semantic knowledge or knowledge of what is termed "synonymous sentence pattern" in rhetoric, but to a larger extent it is determined by pragmatic inference in a specific context.Pragmatic near-synonymous sentences subsume those clause pairs with a different structural pattern but a near-equivalent utterance meaning, clause pairs with the same structural pattern and a synonymous lexical item, and those involving what is known as "pragmatic equivalence" and characterized by a mismatch in literal meaning or sematic relevance.The assortment of situations gives rise to three types of pragmatic near-synonymous sentences:lexical, clause pattern-based and implicature-based.To illustrate these types and their subtypes, examples are chosen from a corpus of 3174 near-synonymous sentences composed of clauses in 200 pieces of HSK Level 6 abbreviated writing by second language learners of Chinese and the corresponding clauses in the original text.