Kuno has also summarized “eight principles of empathy in functional syntax: (1) empathy” hierarchy; (2) surface structure empathy hierarchy; (3) transitivity of empathy relationship; (4) ban on conflicting empathy foci; (5) topic empathy hierarchy; (6) markedness principle for discourse-rule violations; (7)speech act empathy hierarchy; (8) word order empathy hierarchy (Kuno, 1987: 207-216). Although Kuno has contributed a lot to the empathy in the syntax field, his principles just focused on the internal ingredients of sentences, instead of the communicative context of sentences such as verbal communication.来~自^吹冰论+文.网www.chuibin.com/

2.2.2 Empathy in Pragmatics Study 

In 1991, He Ziran first introduced empathy into the field of pragmatics and set forth the concept of “pragmatic empathy”. He holds that pragmatics means the both sides of verbal communication can imagine and understand each other's intention, stand in the perspective of the other side to encoding and decoding. Pragmatics empathy has “two aspects: pragma-linguistics and socio-pragmatics. His” shady has made up the shortcomings of Kuno’s not considering the communicative context. 

In the term of pragma-linguistics, empathy means the speaker expresses his or her psychology, belief, and intension by taking the hearer’s perspective, while the hearer tries to understand the speaker’s pragmatics meaning from the speaker’s perspective. In the term of socio-pragmatics, empathy means the both sides of verbal communication respect the opposite’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions in their positions. Consequentially, the communication will achieve an expected effect. The socio-pragmatic empathy helps a lot with daily communication. It is necessary for us understand others culture instead of ours only. In 2007, Ran Yongping (2007) introduced the concept of pragmatic empathy, and he pointed out that the using of person pronoun can realize pragmatic empathy and narrow the psychological distance between communicators, pragmatic empathy expresses emotional and psychological convergence of communicators.