PhDs
The verbal expression of empathy in Catalan and English (2022)
Supervisor: Hortènsia Curell i Gotor
The main aim of this thesis is to study and compare the speech act of empathy in Catalan and British English. In order to examine how empathy-giving is communicated in these two languages, an ad hoc corpus was compiled, consisting of the recorded interactions of native speakers of these two languages, and analysed mainly from the perspective of pragmatics, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology. The study combines a quantitative and a qualitative approach, offering a comprehensive view of what we could call “socially constructed empathy”. Empathy is therefore seen and treated not as a psychological phenomenon (although some relevant cognitive issues are also included) but as a social, interactional process that is constructed interpersonally. The study focuses on the verbal strategies native speakers use when engaged in troubles telling where an empathic response is expected, their impressions of those interactions and their reflections on the personal and social use of empathy. The findings show that the expression of empathy is complex and co-constructed by the participants in the interaction, and not a matter of using a simple strategy that communicates empathy by itself. Comparing how different participants manage themselves in the same situations and what kind of verbal and non-verbal elements they tend to use allows us to examine differences and similarities in the speech act of empathy-giving in these two languages. The results obtained from analysing the interactions in both groups of speakers seem to differ basically at a pragmalinguistic level (e.g. frequency of use of expletives) but mainly converge at a sociopragmatic level (the performance of the speech act itself). When examining how these conversations are perceived by the participants, findings show that in both language groups there is a significant correlation between the number of strategies and the level of satisfaction of the empathy receiver. The social understanding, production and use of empathy reveal marked similarities between both groups, which point to some common general features characterising the speech act of empathy-giving. By better understanding how the speech act of empathy-giving works, we can learn how to deal more effectively with those situations that require responding in a sensitive and attuned manner and, at the same time, improve our communication skills in most of our everyday interactions. The fields that can benefit from this cover different areas of interest, from the teaching of sociopragmatic aspects in L2 learning to communication skills training in business or medicine, among many others.