My heart and thoughts are with you. Communicating Empathy in Discourse (a Case Study)

Abstract

The article is a part of a more extensive linguistic project exploring the concept of ‘empathy’ and its exponents in the present-day Polish (Falkowska 2012, 2017, 2018). The analysis is based on a corpus compiled out of Polish media texts concerning the tragic Nanga Parbat expedition (January 2018). Selected Internet posts and social media comments have also been included. My focus is on empathy understood along the lines set by Kuno (1987), i.e. the speaker’s identification with one of the scene’s participants. The paper aims at depicting the linguistic means that are applied in order to communicate the speaker’s empathy towards a scene participant. The study employs Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar model (1987, 2009) and the cognitive discourse analysis framework (Hart 2014), with special reference to the notions of empathy, empathy hierarchy and point of view.

Keywords

• empathy; empathy hierarchy; point of view; objectification; nanga parbat expedition 2018