Study On Pragmatic Empathyin The Beverage Advertisementsfrom The Perspectiveof Contextual Adaptation Theory

Since the empathy theory was put forward in the area of aesthetics in Germany in the 19 th century,researchers in the areas of psychology,sociology and linguistics have conducted descriptive analyses on empathy phenomena.In 1991,He Ziran first introduced the empathy theory into the pragmatic field and came up with the conception of pragmatic empathy.As far as he is concerned,pragmatic empathy should be investigated from perspectives of pragma-linguistics and social-pragmatics.Communicative participants in the conversational interaction have to imagine and understand their partners' emotions and intentions through perspective-taking,and encode and decode linguistic information by putting themselves in their shows.Pragmatic empathy in the communicative activities is mainly employed to shorten the psychological distance,achieve emotional convergence and maintain a harmonious interpersonal relationship.As a pragmatic strategy for language interaction,pragmatic empathy deserves more attention and exploration.Based on the contextual adaptation theory put forward by Verschueren,the present study focuses on 130 Chinese advertisements of the top 15 beverage brands in the C-BRI list in 2015 and adopts a qualitative analysis with a combination of quantitative approach.With assistance of the retrieval tool Antconc3.2.0,the author attempts to explore the three major realization forms of pragmatic empathy in the beverage advertisements on the basis of statistic result,and meanwhile probes into the realization of pragmatic empathy by adaptation to the contextual correlates and pragmatic functions.The research results suggest that pragmatic empathy adopted in the beverage advertisement is actually a process of adaptation and choice-making consciously conducted by the advertiser.There are three frequently employed realization forms,namely,person deixis,adoption of affective words and declarative statement of product functions.In order to realize the effects of pragmatic empathy and further achieve the communicative purpose of beverage advertisements,advertisers have to adapt to the language users(beverage consumers)and concrete contextual correlates in the mental world,social world and physical world in the process of linguistic choice-making.Pragmatic empathy adopted in the beverage advertisement serves as an effective means for advertisers to narrow the pragmatic distance and achieve the emotional convergence with the consumers,and contributes much to the brand images and promotion of the product competitive edge.The present research enriches the pragmatic studies about advertising language to some extent and provides some theoretical guidance and reference for advertisers in the creation of advertisements.