A Study Of Pragmatic Empathy In The State Of The Union Addresses From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Empathy is a common language phenomenon in daily communication.It can promote the effective interaction between people and the outside world,and satisfy the needs of communication and achieve the communicative purpose.Scholars in different fields have made different studies on empathy.He Ziran(1991)first introduced the concept of empathy into the field of pragmatics,and put forward the concept of pragmatic empathy.From the pragmatic perspective,empathy means that two communicating parties can share emotions with each other,and the two communicating parties can conceive and understand each others' intention in verbal communication.Although a number of scholars have researched pragmatic empathy from different fields,most of the articles related to empathy use Chinese materials for exploration,such as,Chinese TV talk show,Chinese novels etc..Few of them use adaptation theory to analyze pragmatic empathy in English political discourse.Therefore,this thesis attempts to explore the realization forms and the functions of pragmatic empathy in English political discourses from the perspective of adaptation theory.It is expected to extend the application range of pragmatic empathy and to provide some suggestions for further research.Based on Verschueren's adaptation theory and He Ziran's pragmatic empathy,this thesis,through quantitative and qualitative methods,will conduct research on pragmatic empathy in The State of the Union Address(SUA for short)from two aspects: the language choices and the contextual adaptation.And the thesis intends to answer the following three questions: 1.What are the main forms used to realize the pragmatic empathy in SUA? 2.How is pragmatic empathy realized in SUA through the adaptation to communicative context? 3.What are the functions of pragmatic empathy used in SUA? This thesis selects 7American presidents' SUAs randomly,and chooses 4 SUAs from each president's addresses,totaling 28 SUAs,each of which amounts to 4000 words.The author counts each realizationform of pragmatic empathy based on the corpus.Statistic data are clearly presented in the form of tables.The research shows that there are three frequently used realization forms in SUA: the first person plural “we”,the modal verbs “will”,“can”,and the hedges such as,“I think”,“I believe”,“some”,“nearly” etc..The speaker uses the three main realization forms to realize the pragmatic empathy strategy,to shorten the psychological distance between the speaker and the listener and achieve the communication purposes.Pragmatic empathy strategies,as a result of language choice,need to be adapted to the communicative context in verbal communication.The contextual adaptation of pragmatic empathy in the state union address is as follows: in the mental world,the use of pragmatic empathy strategy should be adapted to the two communicators' motivations and needs;in the social world,the use of pragmatic empathy strategy should be adapted to the social cultural background,social status,and social politeness norms;in the physical world,the use of pragmatic empathy strategy should be adapted to the time and space.The functions of pragmatic empathy in SUA,a particular political discourse,are listed as follows: the president's adoption pragmatic empathy can narrow the psychological distance between the leader and his listener,and establish a harmonious relationship with the listener;it can build a harmonious communicative atmosphere,which can promote political views and obtain support successfully;moreover,the pragmatic empathy that the president used can improve the appropriateness of his utterances,which can reduce misunderstanding,avoid conflict,and achieve his communication purposes.