Abstract: Anaphora is traditionally taken as co-reference at the linguistic level, but metonymic anaphor, which belongs to deep anaphora with no clear antecedent, is controlled by pragmatic and cognitive factors. With in the framework of cognitive pragmatics, this paper discusses the mechanism of metonymic anaphora, and points out that in a specific context metonymic anaphora is motivated by speaker’s reference and constructed by means of hearer’s inference. It is the attempt to make an utterance relevant that ultimately establishes the conceptual connectivity between antecedent and anaphor.

Key words: referential metonymy, anaphor, cognitive pragmatics, reference mechanism