On The Function Of Pragmatic Empathy In American Presidential Speeches

Research on empathy first originated in German aesthetics, which means the natural infiltration of general sentiment. Up until now it has been studied in aesthetics, psychology, psychotherapy, linguistics and so on. In 1991, it was He Ziran who first introduced empathy in the field of pragmatics in China in his article"pragmatic empathy in verbal communication", and he put forward the concept of pragmatic empathy. Empathy in pragmatics refers to the emotional exchange of both sides of speech communication, encoding and decoding the messages by stepping into the other's shoes. Pragmatic empathy can be studied from two aspects: pragma-linguistics and socio-pragmatics. Most present studies on pragmatic empathy have just focused on either of the two aspects and further studies have not been carried out.On the basis of He Ziran's concept of pragmatic empathy, this thesis attempts to investigate pragmatic empathy in selected ten U.S. presidential speeches from 2001 to 2009. As public speeches are important in social life and the U.S. presidential election, every U.S. president is good at speeches and they know how to use linguistic strategies in their speeches. U.S. Presidents can establish a good relationship with the audience; publicize political views and ideas through public speeches. In the selected ten American presidential speeches, the author conducts a detailed analysis of the frequently appeared first person plural form, hedges and euphemisms as these three linguistic strategies are means to achieve pragmatic empathy. This study analyses pragmatic empathy and its function in U.S. presidential speeches by applying politeness theory and face theory.This thesis is divided into six parts. The first part briefly introduces the background and significance of the research and information of corpus; the second part conducts a systematic and comprehensive introduction of empathy and politeness both abroad and at home; the third section presents the theoretical framework of this study; the fourth part is a detailed information of the corpus and the reasons of corpus selection; the fifth part analyses pragmatic empathy based on the theory of politeness and face in U.S. presidential speeches; The last part is a summary of the study.By studying pragmatic empathy in the ten selected U.S. presidential speeches, the author finds that there exist overlapped parts between cooperative principle and politeness principle in the aspect of expressing empathy: the process of achieving pragmatic empathy is to follow the principles of cooperation, the speaker and the listener encode and decode information from the others'position, this is a collaborative performance; courtesy is the motive of pragmatic empathy, and politeness provides a guide to the realization of pragmatic empathy. Secondly, there also exist overlapped parts among the three means of achieving empathy, the speaker is standing on the listener's point of view, following the requirements of politeness, narrowing the psychological distance between both sides, avoiding direct and offending expressions, and finally the speaker achieved the social function of persuasion and self-protection.As an effective communication strategy, pragmatic empathy plays an important role in daily verbal communication. Therefore, research on pragmatic empathy can develop the ability of cross-cultural communication, create a pleasant and polite communicative environment, reduce misunderstanding and avoid conflict, then promote successful communication. This study of pragmatic empathy has its limitations, future researches on pragmatic empathy should be a cross-cultural, multi-angle and multi-level one.