Empatia we współczesnej polszczyźnie

The monograph investigates the meanings of linguistic structures in contemporary Polish that denote the capacity to perceive, interpret, and share various manifestations of other people’s inner lives, as well as those that enable the verbal expression of empathy towards an interlocutor or another participant in a given communicative situation. The proposed linguistic analysis is developed in line with a twofold perspective, distinguishing between talking about empathy and expressing empathy, and is grounded in cognitively oriented theories of meaning.

I propose to distinguish three fundamental components within the semantic structure of the concept empathy: the subject of empathy, the object of empathy, and the focus of empathy, understood as the state of the object triggering the subject’s empathic experience (e.g. sadness, fear, joy). The first part of the analysis adopts a semasiological perspective, with particular attention to the naming of empathy through the basic noun empatia in its non-terminological uses found in texts of general Polish, representing a non-specialist perspective.

I provide a detailed examination of textual realisations of the three semantic components, identifying semantic revaluations of the noun empatia as well as recurrent conceptual metaphors that shape the conceptualisation of empathy. Furthermore, I analyse the functioning of selected lexical units belonging to the derivational nest of empatia (such as empatyk, empatyzować, empatyczny).

The noun empatia is situated within the lexical field of allocentric emotional states and attitudes. Particular emphasis is placed on its relations with well-entrenched lexical items such as współodczuwanie, współczucie, litość, and miłosierdzie. In a separate, onomasiologically oriented section, I discuss – based on selected examples – the linguistic strategies employed to express empathy and to construct an empathetic point of view within discourse.

Both the material under analysis and the corresponding descriptive approaches are subordinated to the overarching aim of the monograph: to provide a comprehensive semantic and pragmatic account of the ways in which the concept of empathy is actualised in contemporary Polish texts. The linguistic study is framed by psychological and philosophical conceptions of empathy, outlined in the introductory section of the work. The collected empirical data indicate that the concept of empathy has already achieved considerable stability in present-day Polish. The noun empatia, which provides a basic lexical expression to this concept, now functions as a fullfledged element within the field of names of allocentric emotional states and attitudes, while concurrently serving as the basis of a derivational nest – albeit currently still modest. The widespread use of this lexeme reflects a broader trend towards the popularisation of psychological terminology (often in a simplified form) and its diffusion into general language.