A Study On Pragmatic Features Of Marketing Persuasive Language

The 2008 Olympics brings a big business opportunity to China. With the approaching of the games, the service industry pays more and more attention to improve the quality of service. The commercial bureau of Beijing has started an English training program among the service industry in 2005. Plenty of world-famous shops take fluent English communication skill as a must when recruiting new salesperson.This paper is an investigation into the pragmatic features of face-to-face persuasive marketing communication specifically focusing on persuasive communication with foreigners. By reviewing the related literature on persuasion in rhetoric, social psychology, ZongHeng Shu (纵横术) in ancient times of China, it has been found that none of these disciplines have studied persuasion fully. Jef Verschueren's linguistic adaptation theory, which was influenced by evolutionary epistemology, and attempted to explain linguistic structure by reference to non-linguistic pressures and causes, throws new light on persuasion.This study, through carefully scrutinizing the obtained data, by reference to the model proposed by Yu Guodong, builds a framework of analysis on the basis of Linguistic Adaptation Theory. Using the framework, the present study classifies the persuasive utterances of shop assistants and individual sellers as adaptation to physical world, adaptation to social conventions, and adaptation to psychological motivations.