A Corpus Linguistic Approach to Analyzing "Empathy"

This book provides a corpus linguistic overview of a word that has achieved quite wide popularity in a variety of discourse domains today: “empathy.” According to the Oxford Online English Dictionary, “empathy” is “the ability to understand and appreciate another person’s feelings, experience, etc.,” and it is not only difficult to define, but also a “buzzword” in many different areas of life and discourse, from climate change, to politics more widely, to marketing and popular psychology. However, some general assumptions that apply to the word “empathy” in English, i.e. that it is good to have empathy, that it is the moral attitude to show towards other people, and possibly also one of the qualities that set us out from other animals (“what makes us human”) may be less than accurate. The tools used to critically approach these assumptions in this book are discourse analytical and, more specifically, they consist in adopting a systemic functional grammatical formalism to investigate the use of the word “empathy” in a large contemporary language corpus, English Web 2020. The interpretation of corpus data through the lens of systemicism seems particularly suitable for the task on hand because it has already been successfully used in corpus linguistic literature to investigate “emotion talk.” Chapter 1 lays the foundations to understand the concept of empathy, by looking at it from a variety of disciplinary angles, i.e. psychology, sociology, philosophy, and cognitive studies. The main questions addressed in Chapter 1 are: is empathy always positive? is empathy an individual feature of a person’s character? is empathy moral? Finally, and perhaps most crucially, is empathy what makes us human? The Chapter summarizes a set of answers that several research areas have provided for these questions. Chapter 2 looks at corpus examples of how the word “empathy” is used in English from the perspective of representation or, in systemic functional terms, ideational meaning. As the main focus of this study is an individual word, and more precisely a noun, Chapter 2 looks at dependency and logico-semantics at group level, focusing on the ideational role the word “empathy” plays in the most frequent noun groups and verb groups identified in English Web 2020 as containing it. Chapter 3 adopts the same methodology, but it moves up to a higher level of the systemic rank scale, i.e. the clause. It tackles the extremely large area of interpersonal meanings in grammatical systemicism, as far as the role of the word “empathy” is concerned. Interpersonal meanings are perhaps the largest and most complex area of Systemic Functional Linguistics, so the chapter only touches upon its surface, by looking at the language of evaluation and, more specifically, at Attitude, probably the most suitable System within Appraisal theory to combine with corpus tools, i.e. by extracting and analyzing the use of adjectives modifying the word “empathy.” Finally, Chapter 4 extends its focus from the clause to the text, by addressing the role of the word “empathy” in cohesion, under the assumption that, to understand the meaning of “empathy,” it is necessary to look at the relations between this word and surrounding ones in texts. Perhaps most importantly, understanding the meaning of the word “empathy” requires looking at how arguments are constructed around this word, from the points of view of texture, coherence and cohesive harmony. This is why Chapter 4 prioritizes the analysis of non-structural cohesive devices, leaving aside – apart from a few cursory considerations – the equally fascinating area of structural Cohesion within grammatical systemicism, which remains much more complicated to explore with corpus tools. Conclusions show that a univocal definition for “empathy” does not seem to exist: its very nature as an emotion, a feeling, an attitude, a character trait, a skill or a conscious choice appears to be unclear and open to different interpretations, depending on the contexts in which empathy may be expected and on the people that are involved in an empathetic relation or reaction. Very often, “empathy” is actually understood as feeling someone else’s negative feelings, not their feelings generally, blurring boundaries with the meaning of “sympathy.” There are many attempts throughout the corpus to come up with a definition of “empathy,” but they are often inconclusive or apophatic, i.e. they define “empathy” through a negation, by telling us what it is not, in co-occurrence with negation or other expressions with a negative meaning. Besides some more traditional views of empathy as akin to compassion and kindness, “professionalism” also occurs as a strong collocate, showing that, on the workplace, “empathy” is often seen as a desirable feature of a professional’s profile. This may also have a dark side, e.g. in the healthcare sector, where employees are exposed to burnout because of too much empathy with their patients. Overall, it is concluded that empathy deserves more study in all areas that have it as an object of investigation, from the clinical to the psychological and philosophical, including language and discourse. Empathy’s interaction with culture (e.g. how empathy is understood and expressed differently in different cultures), pragmatics (e.g. how it connects with politeness) and psycholinguistics (e.g. whether empathetic language has any biological triggers in the brain) is a particularly urgent area to explore, but grammar can also make a very important contribution. Perhaps most promising is the area of inclusive language, especially as concerns gender inclusive and gender diverse pronouns, as well as other lexicogrammatical innovations aiming to make women and LGBTQ+ people more visible in society, to provide a balancing instrument against gender bias, and to make sure gender-nonconforming people feel respected and safe.