Pragmatic Empathy In Chinese Commercial Advertisements: An Adaptation Approach

Empathy, coming from the German word"Einf?hlung", is a concept originating from German aesthetics in the late 19th century, which means"feeling into", and then it was introduced in American experimental psychology in the early 20th century. The study of empathy involved in many fields, like aesthetics, psychology, linguistics, language teaching, intercultural communication and so on. He Ziran (1991) first introduced the study of empathy into the field of pragmatics and then put forward the concept of pragmatic empathy which can be approached from two aspects: pragma-linguistics and socio-pragmatics. Pragmatic empathy is a very important strategy that has been frequently used in Chinese commercial advertisements by the advertisers, but it hasn't received much attention. The present study attempts to analyze the strategy of pragmatic empathy existing in Chinese commercial advertisements.Based on Verschueren's Adaptation Theory (2000), the author first tries to analyze the eight realization forms, then makes a deep survey into the psychological factors and finally discloses the psychological mechanism behind the utilization of pragmatic empathy. In advertisements, pragmatic empathy means that advertisers should stand in the position of their customers to convey their ideas when making advertisements and there are two rules they have to obey when carrying out the strategy of pragmatic empathy: (1) to stand in the position of the target consumers to imagine their needs and desires. (2) to use advertising language from the perspective of the potential consumers.(Zhang Yangfen, 1998)By doing so, the customers may have the feeling that the manufacturers are always trying to do whatever is in their best interest. In this case, pragmatic empathy is well achieved.This paper has analyzed the generation mechanism of pragmatic empathy based on the Adaptation Theory. In the process of analysis, we find that the use of pragmatic empathy is a process of continuous choice-making with high consciousness. The use of pragmatic empathy is actually the speaker's making adaptation to psychological world, social world and pragmatic distance. The findings of this study have significant theoretical and practical meanings on the study of pragmatic empathy. Through the comprehensive analysis of the generation mechanism and the realization forms of pragmatic empathy, this study will enlighten the Chinese advertisers when making Chinese commercial advertisements.