A Study Of Deictic Expressions In Chinese And English Advertisements From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Empathy

With the rapid development of economy and technology,advertising language has become a specialized communicative tool in modern society.It cannot be denied that advertisements play important roles in our daily life which have been studied by many scholars from different aspects.This thesis tries to conduct a descriptive-analytic study to analyze the deictic expressions in Chinese and English advertisements from the perspective of pragmatic empathy.It combines the relevant theory with corpus which regards pragmatic empathy,deixis and advertisements as the backbone of the whole article to lay emphasis on analyzing person deixis,temporal deixis and spatial deixis in Chinese and English advertisements.Pragmatic empathy,is an interdisciplinary terminology proposed by the the Chinese linguist He Ziran which means both the parities who are involved in the act of the verbal communication feel more emotionally connected with each other so that they can put themselves in the place of others.In order to construct a more harmonious interpersonal relationship,the speaker and the hearer manage to seek the emotional convergence between each other which can shorten the psychological distance.As the subjective of this thesis,deixis refers to pointing or indicating via language in certain context.According to Levinson,it is the deixis that apparently reflects the relationship between the structure of language and the context,especially the context-dependence of language comprehension.Up to now,a lot of scholars working in different academic fields have devoted themselves on studying these two terms,but seldom touched upon the relationship between deixis and pragmatic empathy.What's more,comparing to the studies abroad which extends more than one hundred years,China being the late starters to conduct studies on deixis has benefited a lot from the existing theoretical achievements,but resulting in the deficiency of novelty and creativity belonging to our own studies.It can be concluded that the studies on the combination of deixis and pragmatic empathy lay foundations to widen the domestic research levels.This thesis consists of three parts: introduction,body part and conclusion.Introduction mainly deals with the the background of the research including somereview studies about deixis and pragmatic empathy;the reasons for choosing the topic,and some remained problems which should be further solved.It also gives a brief account of the theoretical and practical significance of the thesis aiming at revealing the necessity of the research.The second part is the main body part that can be sub-divided into three chapters.Chapter One serves as the literature review in which the previous studies on deixis and empathy are presented.Specifically speaking,the research subject deixis is illustrated from both psychological and linguistic perspective including the typical definitions,classifications,characteristics and usage.What's more,pragmatic empathy as the perspective of the thesis is elaborated from three aspects including the definitions,development of empathy and research situations.Chapter Two mainly makes a comparative analysis of deixis in Chinese and English advertising discourse from the perspective of pragmatic empathy based on the theoretical foundation demonstrated in the first two chapters.The advertising discourse that are randomly selected from both the English and Chinese journals serve as the corpus of the research in order to analyze the similarities and differences between them by means of the tables and charts.Beginning with the overall study of the statistical results exhibited in the deictic expressions,these three deixis including person deixis,place deixis and time deixis are analyzed respectively from the emphatic perspective.As the data shows that,the frequency of proximal deixis in both Chinese and English advertisements is higher than that of distal deixis,thus highlighting the influence of pragmatic empathy in choosing appropriate deicitc expressions in advertisements.All of deixis in advertisements are required to take others into consideration from the emphatic perspective to guarantee the psychological distance between customer and advertiser will be shortened.In Chapter Three attention is paid to the functions of deixis in advertising discourse from three aspects: pragmatic empathetic function,constructive function to context and social communicative functions.As an efficient interactive strategy,the application of deictic expressions in advertising discourse makes the potential customers feel that this advertisement is specially designed for them to shortenpsychological distance.It is obvious from the data that the advertisers must choose proper deixis with reference of the communicative needs in order to build a context which is useful for realizing the communicative intention and then ensure the success of communication.The last part concludes the whole thesis by providing the major findings and limitations of the thesis.Owing to the data analyzed from the Chapter Two and Chapter Three,it is obvious that the linguistic choice of deictic expressions in advertisements is actually a process of adaptation which is affected by contextual and psychological factors among which pragmatic empathy enjoys more priority.At last,the author makes some personal suggestions for further studies.