An Analysis Of Strategic Use Of Pragmatic Empathy In Verbal Communicative Activities

Empathy was first proposed by the German anesthetists in the nineteenth century andwas later introduced to the fields of psychology, sociology, linguistics and so on. In linguisticfield, it has been studied from the aspects of foreign language teaching and cross-culturalcommunication. Professor He Ziran, for the first time in1991, introduced the concept intopragmatics and put forward new concept pragmatic empathy. In his opinion, pragmaticempathy means that both the addressor and the addressee encode and decode the conversationby thinking at the other one’s standpoint with the purpose of making the conversation gosmooth and meaningful. Pragmatic empathy is employed widely in daily communication as acommunicative strategy, so the study of it is of great research value. Based on the datacollected, this thesis adopts adaptation theory to conduct a qualitative research of pragmaticempathy. The objectives of this thesis are to reveal the addressor’s motivation of adoptingpragmatic empathy strategy and the functions of pragmatic empathy in verbal communication.With the purpose of analyzing the use of pragmatic empathy systematically anddynamically, this study collects and selects nineteen examples under different contents.According to the definition and features of institutional talks, the use of pragmatic empathystrategy is analyzed by dividing the examples into institutional language and non-institutionallanguage. It reveals that the purpose of the addresser’s adoption of pragmatic empathy is torealize self-adaptation. By adopting pragmatic empathy strategy, the addressor’s institutionalidentity is adapted to in institutional language, while the motivations of the addressor or bothof the addressor and the addressee are adapted to in non-institutional language. In this thesis,the concepts of direct addressees and indirect addressees are formed, thus making the thesisstructure more systematic and complete. This is wherein the innovation of the thesis lies, whichis of certain theoretic significance.In the last place, this thesis analyzes the functionality of pragmatic empathy. It points outthat the strategic use of pragmatic empathy can both lead to shortening the pragmatic distancebetween the addressor and the addressee, as well as to establishing a harmonious atmosphere.Meanwhile, this thesis points out that pragmatic empathy, as a communicative strategy, has theapplied functions of assisting better communication between the two parties, thus building aharmonious society, which is also of certain practical significance.