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In:Emancipatory Pragmatics: Innovative approaches to pragmatics incorporating the concept of “ba”
Edited by Yoko Fujii, William F. Hanks, Sachiko Ide, Scott Saft and Kishiko Ueno
[Culture and Language Use 24] 2025
► pp. 300–324

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Empathy and vocatives in Chinese

From the perspective of ba pragmatics

 | Harbin Engineering University
 | Nanjing University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 2 December 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.24.12mao
Abstract
This paper discusses how empathy, the speaker’s feeling towards the others, is relevant to the use of Chinese vocatives. It argues that, first, Chinese speaker’s use of vocatives demonstrates the inclusion of the listener’s basho self in the self-in-others undifferentiated primary ba, where empathy is mutually shared among participants. Second, the use of Chinese vocatives reflects the speaker’s adoption of an internal perspective, through which participants’ empathy is perceived. Third, the moment-to-moment change in vocative use, contingent on the degree of empathy, can be explained by the “improvisation model”. The findings suggest that Chinese vocatives in the secondary ba serve as the articulation of the participants’ empathy in the primary ba.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Vocatives and variables in society
    • 2.2Vocatives and functions in use
    • 2.3Vocatives and empathy in interaction
  • 3.Theoretical background
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Empathy, vocatives, and the two-domain model of the self
    • 4.2Empathy, vocatives, and the internal perspective
    • 4.3Empathy, vocatives, and the improvisation model
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (58)
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