An Analysis Of Pragmatic Empathy In “Yang Lan One On One”:An Adaptation Approach

Empathy research originated in Aesthetic in Germany, which means emotional penetration, is now across the field of aesthetics and becomes the research topic in the field of psychology, psychological therapy and linguistics, etc. He Ziran(1991) first introduced the empathy study to the field of pragmatics and advanced the concept pragmatic empathy. As a form of language choice, it is widely used in daily communication. However, the previous studies of empathy mainly focus on three fields of psychology,aesthetics and language learning. It is rare that adaptation theory is used to explore the question of pragmatic empathy in verbal communication, let alone in TV interviews. So the thesis attempts to study the following questions:(1) What are the realization forms of pragmatic empathy in “Yang Lan One on One”?(2) What are the pragmatic functions of these realization forms in “Yang Lan One on One”?(3) How will pragmatic empathy be realized in “Yang Lan One on One” through the adaptation to context?The study aims to use Jef Verschueren’s adaptation theory, guided by the core idea of adaptation: the process of language use is the process of language choice; at the same time, also comply with the process of contextual relationship. The author selects 15 interviews from “Yang Lan One on One” as the corpus to study the phenomenon of pragmatic empathy.In the process of study, both quantitative and qualitative research methods are adopted. As for the first research question, the author counts the frequency of the basic realization forms in “Yang Lan One on One”. By comparing these realization forms the author finds three frequently used realization forms in the interview. When studying the pragmatic functions of these three realization forms and how they adapt to various contexts, the author adopts both qualitative and quantitative method to conduct a detailed study by counting the distribution of frequency of each form and combining the concrete corpus. Through the study,the author draws the following conclusions:(1) The author finds three are three frequently used realization forms in the interview: unconventional usage of second deixis “you”, hedges and euphemism, which have significant influence in achieving pragmatic empathy.(2) The study shows that the unconventional use of second person “you” is commonly used to achieve empathy in interviews. It is a way by which the hearer is involved in the discourse, since the speaker gives the hearer the role of behavior type and reduces the hearer’s psychological distance with the speaker, thusexerting a pragmatic effect of vivid and intimate love.(3) In addition, through the counting of frequency and percentage of hedges in “Yang Lan One on One”, the author find, in the interview, the use of hedges, on the one hand, can maintain the speaker’s face,on the other hand, can accord with the politeness principle. By choosing the appropriate hedges, both sides in communication should adapt to each other’s mental world so as to achieve pragmatic empathy. The use of euphemism is also common in the interview. The hostess always uses euphemism to replace some sensitive topics in the process of interview so as not to bring psychological hurt to the guest. In addition,the choice of euphemism should adapt to the mental world of the interlocutors, which involves mood, face and politeness motive.In the framework of adaptation theory, as a communicative strategy, empathy has the applied functions of assisting better communication between the two parties, thus building a harmonious society,which is also of certain practical significance. So the study of pragmatic empathy in TV interview “Yang Lan One on One” has both theoretical and practical significance.