An Analysis Of Pragmatic Empathy In Waiting For Me: An Adaptation-based Approach

Empathy is an extremely common phenomenon in people's daily life,and it plays an important role in establishing and promoting a harmonious interpersonal relationship.The study of empathy originated in German aesthetics,focusing on the emotional infiltration between people and things.Gradually it has expanded to areas such as psychology,sociology and linguistics,and has achieved major development.Professor He Ziran first introduced the study of empathy into the field of pragmatics,put forward the concept of pragmatic empathy,and studied pragmatic empathy from the aspects of pragma-linguistics and social-pragmatics.Based on He Ziran's view on pragmatic empathy and Verschueren's adaptation theory,the present study attempts to define pragmatic empathy as not only a language strategy,but also an outcome of language choice and a dynamic process of adaptation to communicative context.In Waiting for Me,Ni Ping successfully adopts the strategy of pragmatic empathy,which helps realize the communicative needs and contributes to the success of the program.This study attempts to use Verschueren's adaptation theory as a foundation to build a theoretical framework,and analyzes the interviews between Ni Ping and the guests in Waiting for Me in 2017 to study pragmatic empathy.The main purpose of this study is to discuss pragmatic empathy through exploring its realizations,adaptation mechanism and pragmatic function,so as to enrich the study,enhance people's further understanding,and with the further purpose of applying it to interpersonal communication to accomplish communicative goals and establish harmonious interpersonal relationships.The present study discovers that in Waiting for Me,seven kinds of language forms are used to realize pragmatic empathy.They are address forms,euphemism,hedges,deixis,interruptions,compliments,and mandarin-dialect codeswitching,all of which are the outcome of language choosing.Moreover,pragmatic empathy is also a dynamic process of adapting to the adaptation mechanism.Therefore,this study also analyzes the communicative context in Waiting for Me,and finds out that pragmatic empathy is a dynamic process of adapting to the mental world,social world and physical world.The adaptation to the mental world consists of adaptation to utterers' emotions as well as their psychological motivations.And the adaptation to the social world contains adaptation to interlocutors' social background and adaptation to the social norms.The adaptation to the physical world includes the adaptation to spatial and temporal context.On the basis of adaptation to the communicative context,this study also expounds the function of pragmatic empathy,and discusses five major functions.The use of pragmatic function guarantees the natural opening and closing of the interview,guides the smooth ongoing of the interview,shows respect and politeness to the guests,shortens the social and psychological distance and creates a harmonious relationship between the interlocutors..Based on the adaptation theory,and through the analysis of pragmatic empathy in Waiting for Me,this thesis offers a working definition of pragmatic empathy,and attempts to analyze it by using the constructed theoretical framework.To conclude,this study enriches the corpus of the studies on pragmatic empathy,and makes an effective and feasible attempt to analyze it under the theoretical framework.It also bears the hope of enabling the majority of language users to use pragmatic empathy to accomplish communicative purpose and establish a harmonious interpersonal relationship.