A Multi-Dimensional Study Of Pragmatic Empathy

Empathy, originated in German aesthetics and meaning "feeling into", has been studied in aesthetics, psychology, psychotherapy, linguistics and so on. He Ziran (1991) first set forth the application of empathy to pragmatics and proposed the concept of pragmatic empathy. In pragmatics, empathy is that the speaker and the hearer, who are involved in the act of communication, can detect and identify the immediate affective state of each other, encode and decode 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 have not been conducted in a deep-going way. There is a lack of systematic study on pragmatic empathy. On the basis of He Ziran's concept of pragmatic empathy, this thesis attempts to investigate the nature, the socio-cultural functions, the cognitive efforts, the psychological cost, the regulating efforts and the realization of pragmatic empathy from three dimensions: social-cultural dimension, cognitive-psychological dimension and the realization. It is hoped that we can gain a deep insight into the nature and functional mechanisms of pragmatic empathy to improve our skills in achieving pragmatic empathy in the process of communication.Socio-culturally, pragmatic empathy shares a great deal of overlap with Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle. The process of achieving pragmatic empathy is also a process of following Cooperative Principle, i.e., both speaker's accurate encoding and hearer's correct decoding from the other's perspective are cooperative efforts for successful communication. Pragmatic empathy is highly motivated by the consideration of politeness and Politeness Principle serves as an guide for achieving pragmatic empathy. Based on the above analysis, this thesis has summarized the nature of pragmatic empathy as: pragmatic empathy is reciprocal, stressing a kind of "you" orientation and equality between participants in communication; pragmatic empathy indicates a kind of co-operative effort and requires the participants' contributions to be quite polite and appropriate in communication. As an effective communicative strategy, pragmatic empathy plays an important role in communication.From a cognitive-psychological perspective, cognitive efforts and psychological cost are required in achieving pragmatic empathy. Cognitive efforts consist of mind-reading and perspective-taking, while psychological cost requires the empathizer to suppress his true feelings properly. This paper has proposed two ways of regulating pragmatic empathy: bridging the gap between self and other, and preparing for pragmatic empathy.As to the realization of pragmatic empathy, the intentional selection of address forms, deixis, indirect speech acts, vague words and expressions, and modality could indicate communicators's attitudes, feeling and considerations towards the other, thus facilitate communicators in conveying involvement and empathy towards the other.