A Corpus Linguistic Approach to Analyzing ‘Empathy’

This volume offers an in-depth corpus linguistic analysis of the word “empathy” toward fostering unique insights into a word widely found across contemporary discourses and into methodological innovations for analyzing large corpora.

Given the understanding of empathy’s importance for individual and social development, the book demonstrates the potential of a corpus approach to shed new light on a significant yet difficult-to-define concept. Fusari systematically applies the use of concordances and other corpus output to derive patterns and recurrent phraseologies in the 36+ billion-word electronic corpus, English Web 2020, to help readers grapple with key ideas around empathy. Such questions include what we really mean by empathy, whether it is always positive, whether it is learned or innate, and whether empathy is truly what “makes us human.” The volume contends with these questions across disciplines, from the clinical to the psychological and philosophical to the linguistic and discursive.

Opening new areas of research into inclusive language and the use of corpus tools to analyze individual terms, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in corpus linguistics and applied linguistics, as well as such fields as cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, and allied health.