A Research On The Pragmatic Empathy Phenomena In Online Shopping Conversations

The concept of empathy first originated from western aesthetics,which meant “feeling into”.Subsequently,empathy was gradually introduced into the field of psychology,sociology,linguistics,etc.It was the Japanese linguist Kuno that first applied empathy into linguistics.In1991,the Chinese linguist He Ziran first put forward the term of “pragmatic empathy” in his article “Pragmatic empathy in verbal communication”.According to professor He,pragmatic empathy generally means the emotional exchange between the speaker and the hearer in the process of speech communication,always encoding and decoding the information from the other's perspectives.It mainly concerns that how the speaker confides to the hearer and expresses his intention and that how the hearer perceives the state of mind and intention of the speaker by putting himself in the speaker's position.This thesis conducts qualitative and quantitative analyses on pragmatic empathy phenomena in the online shopping conversations collected from Taobao.com.It is found that the realization forms of pragmatic empathy adopted by the sellers mainly include the reasonable use of person deixis(e.g.“?”,“?”),address forms(e.g.“?”),greetings(e.g.“??”);the frequent use of modal particles(e.g.“?”);and offering various products information,valuable suggestions,kind warnings for the buyers,and so on.Following the four principles of pragmatic empathy,namely equality,rationality,politeness and information,the sellers are able to take the buyers'state of mind into full consideration so as to decode from the buyers'perspective with the help of these realization forms.A questionnaire is also designed to testify the objectivity of these pragmatic empathy phenomena summarized by the author.Through analysis,it is found that the result of the questionnaire basically corresponds to the qualitative analysis.