I've been there, so I can empathize… Polish and English Verbal Expressions Denoting Empathy

The paper provides a semantic and syntactic analysis of selected Polish and English verbal expressions denoting an empathetic attitude: empatyzować and to empathize. It constitutes a part of a larger research project carried out within the framework of cognitive semantics and is focused on tracing the ways the concept of EMPATHY is conceptualized in contemporary Polish. The noun empatia is a relatively recent, although expansive, loanword in the Polish language. Its verbal derivative empatyzować has not found its way into dictionaries yet, and corpus data attest that it is still rare. In English, however, the range of verbal expressions pertaining to the concept of EMPATHY is more extensive and stable. The paper scrutinizes the usage of selected verbs, with special regard to their syntactic characteristics and their distinguishing semantic components. The analysis is based predominantly on corpus data: National Corpus of Polish and Monco PL for Polish, and COCA for American English.