2.1 Previous Studies on Empathy
2.1.1 Definitions of Empathy
In history, empathy has been noticed by some scholars and philosophers since Aristotle time. Vischer (1873) coined the term “Einfühlung”, which meant “feeling into”. And it was considered as a special means to extend one’s emotional activities to other people or objects in aesthetics. Titchener (1909) translated it into English as “empathy”, and later on Titchener (1924) defined empathy as a process of humanizing objects, of reading or feeling ourselves into them.
After its origination in German aesthetics, empathy was studied and expanded into different fields including psychology, sociology, linguistics, etc., and many scholars and researchers have tried to give an appropriate definition of empathy in respective fields. However, as a very abstract concept which has a broad application, empathy is quite difficult to be defined properly. The followings are some definitions of empathy from different perspectives.
According to Wikipedia, empathy is referred to as an emotional state. It is described as a state that people care for others’ feelings and can imagine the emotion that others are in, and have willingness to help them.
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary (2009:256) defines empathy as “the ability to imagine and share another person’s feelings, experiences.” From this definition, it can be seen that empathy is referred to as an ability rather than as an emotional state.
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2.2 Previous Studies on Pragmatic Empathy
Zhang and Miao (2004) claim that empathy in linguistic field covers the range of study from two major perspectives, respectively functional syntax and pragmatics. The functional syntax perspective was advocated by Kuno, as is presented above, while the latter, in the field of pragmatics, scholars in China such as He Ziran (1991, 2002, 2007) and Ran Yongping (2007), etc. have studied empathy based on all the factors of context which may influence interactions.
2.2.1 Definition of Pragmatic Empathy
He Ziran (1991) first proposed the concept of pragmatic empathy in his work Pragmatic Empathy in Verbal Communication. Moreover, He defines empathy in pragmatics as “both sides in verbal communication in which process their emotions are interlinked, and they can imagine and understand each others’ emotions, intentions, encoding and decoding the messages by stepping into the others’ shoes.”(ibid.) He interpreted pragmatic empathy as a langu
