Abstract:

Using inflammatory language to induce consumption emotions is the key to not only build all sales promotions into sales accelerators, but also strengthen promotional inducements and form a huge appeal with the help of a large number of advertisements in large-scale online sales promotion. In order to explore the impacts of different promotion languages on future-oriented emotions, based on the theories of psycholinguistics, prefactual thinking and future-oriented emotions, this research takes conditional clause presented by the combination of conditional limitations and material incentives as a point of penetration, and combines the research findings of psycholinguistics in sentence pattern, grammar, vocabulary and sentence structure to explore the following six psycholinguistic mechanisms of future-oriented emotions induced by large-scale online sales promotion. First, drawing on the appraisal model of emotion, this research explores the cognitive antecedents of future-oriented emotions including anxiety, hope, anticipated regret and anticipated rejoice by considering the relationship between conditional clause and prefactual thinking. Second, based on the relationship between upward or downward prefactual thinking and positive or negative emotions, as well as the priority of upward prefactual thinking inducing motivation, this research clarifies the dominant role of positive future-oriented emotions in the decision process in large-scale online sales promotion. Third, in the light of the links between anticipatory or anticipated emotions and probability or anticipated outcomes, this research investigates the mechanisms of both conditional words inducing anticipatory emotions and incentive words inducing anticipated emotions. Fourth, as different auxiliary words are different in concrete degrees, part of speech and emotional orientations, this research explores the influencing mechanism of different auxiliary words strengthening future-oriented emotions, using the linguistic category model. Fifth, according to the constrictive conditional clause presented by complex discounts such as “X off on purchase of Y”, and the relationship between the surface structure and the deep structure of sentences, this research reveals the framing mechanism of the surface structure influencing future-orientated emotions from the psycholinguistic perspective, and therefore laying a solid foundation for the further exploration of the psycholinguistic mechanism in promotion framework. Sixth, considering the characteristics of the combinations of conditional limitations and material incentives in large-scale online sales promotion, this research explores the attenuation mechanism of promotional inducements combination inducing future-oriented emotions caused by cognitive miserliness, and the differences between abstract and concrete promotional text in inducing anticipated and anticipatory emotions. In general, this research innovatively adopts a psycholinguistic perspective rather than a traditional information model to explore sales promotion, making up for the deficiency of the existing research by using promotion design principles to explain the occurrence of future-oriented emotions and the impacts of specific emotions on rapid decision-making. This research also breaks through the limitations of the existing research which pays one-sided attention to negative emotions such as “anticipated regret”，and its findings will make theoretical contributions to decision-making in large-scale online sales promotion, future-oriented emotions and psycholinguistics. Practically, this research is also of great help to summarize the principles of promotional communication and to enrich the understanding of how to use better language creativity to induce future-oriented emotions.

Key words: large-scale online sales promotion, future-oriented emotions, psycholinguistics, prefactual thinking, conditional clause