Analysing sympathy from a contrastive pragmatic angle: a Chinese–English case study

4.2.1 Consoling the other for being scammed (Chinese)

Table 2 shows the different speech acts across various role relationships:

In this scenario, the most frequent speech act is Opine, through which information is communicated in a ‘subjective’ way. In all role relationships, our respondents realised ritualised Opines:

Such Opines are ritual because our participants only expressed social meanings by stating the obvious, often in a manner as if they were ‘congratulating’ the scammer. The function of this ritually realised speech act is to assure the recipient that the speaker is aware of the difficulty of the situation.

Idioms are also used to express sympathy, typically embedded in Opines in [+P] relationships:

In (11), our respondent used the idiomatic phrase liude-qingshan-zai, buchou-mei-chaishao 留得青山在, 不愁没柴烧 (‘while the green hills continue exist there’ll be wood to burn’),^[1] while in (12) the idiom pocai-mianzai 破财免灾 (‘a financial loss may prevent a larger disaster’) is used. These expressions have a ritual role as they express something obvious and as such have a much stronger social rather than referential meaning.

The second most frequent speech act is Suggest, an illocution in which “a speaker communicates that he is in favour of H’s performing a future action as in H’s own interests” (Edmondson et al. 2023: 126). Suggest has two major realisation types in our dataset:

1. 1. 1. In [–P] settings, it encompasses illocutions through which the other is suggested to contact the police urgently:

Considering that our DCT features a scenario where the participants are informed about the scam event after it occurred, such realisations of Suggest are clearly ritual, i.e. their role is mainly to express the speaker’s care for the other.

1. In [+P] settings, our participants also frequented Opines realised with formulae to ritually express sympathy. For instance, in (11) our respondent used the formula nin-bie-tai-xinji 您别太心急 (‘you [V pronoun] should not be too impatient’) as a ritual and deferential ‘advice’.

As Table 2 shows, the speech act Willing (Offer) is frequented in the [–P,–SD] and [+P,–SD] scenarios. This tendency indicates that this speech act is less conventionalised than Opine and Suggest which occur in all role relationships: our respondents only offered help to those whom they actually intended to help. Extract (13) has already illustrated a Willing (Offer) realisation in a [–P,–SD] response, while (14) features the [+P,–SD] setting:

(14) also includes a Request (for information), which – similar to Willing (Offer) – may not be part of the regular repertoire of the ritual: such inquiries about whether legal action has been taken – rather than providing symbolic suggestions – may reflect genuine interest.

The speech act Sympathise occurs in our Chinese dataset infrequently and only in [–P] settings:

4.2.2 Consoling the other for being scammed (English)

Table 3 shows the different speech acts across various role relationships:

In our English DCTs, by far the most frequent speech act is Sympathise, often realised with the expression ‘I’m/am sorry [for/to]’:

In [–SD] scenarios, various respondents also used non-formulaic Sympathise expressions:

The frequency of Sympathise in our English DCT shows that this speech act is practically compulsory here and therefore is also ritualised.

Opine is also ritualised in our English dataset: it encompasses negative moralising opinions about the state of the world where scamming occurs, hence boosting sympathy. Opine is frequented particularly in [+SD] settings where Willing (Offer) rarely occurs, and so it is likely that it helps the speaker to express sympathy without committing herself to act.

Willing (Offer) occurs mostly in [–SD] relationships (see (20)), i.e. this speech act tends to be realised in situations where the speaker actually means that she is ready to help the recipient. Similarly, Request (for information) is also frequented in [–SD] relationships where the speaker is willing to get involved:

4.2.3 Contrastive analysis and discussion of the findings

Figure 2 summarises the similarities and differences between our Chinese and English DCT datasets:

Figure 2:

Contrastive analysis of speech acts frequented in consoling the other for being scammed in Chinese and English.

As the double-headed arrows show, Chinese and English realisations of consoling the other for being scammed have various pragmatic similarities: in both linguacultures, Opine, Willing (Offer) and Request (for information) are frequented, and their realisation patterns show resemblances. However, such similarities are eclipsed if one considers the pragmatic differences illustrated with highlighted boxes:

1. The frequency and ritualised nature of Suggest in Chinese, in particularly in [+P] scenarios, which is totally absent in the English data; and

2. The frequency and ritualised nature of Sympathise in English, which is infrequent in Chinese.

4.2.4 Consoling the other for falling seriously ill (Chinese)

Table 4 shows the different speech acts across various role relationships:

As Table 4 illustrates, the most frequent speech act here is Wish-Well, through which “a speaker expresses his positive attitude towards his hearer by ‘wishing him well’ for the future” (Edmondson et al. 2023: 185). In cases of illness, Wish-Well involves a positive attitude towards the other’s recovering. In our Chinese data, Wish-Well tends to be realised with formulae in all relationships:

The most typical Wish-Well is zaori-kangfu 早日康复 (lit. ‘turn healthy early’), although various participants also used other pragmatic solutions like zhu-ni zhansheng-binggui 祝你战胜病魔 (lit. ‘I hope you defeat the devil of illness’).

Suggest is another speech act used ritually, with the formula baozhong 保重 (lit. ‘guard your dear health’) and its variants, often in combination with Wish-Well, as extracts (23) and (24) illustrated. In [–P] relationships, two of our participants provided less conventionalised formulaic Suggests:

Here the response includes buyao-tai-danxin 不要太担心 (‘you shouldn’t be too worried’) and yiding-yao-le’guan 一定要乐观 (‘definitely be positive’). While these formulae may be less conventionalised, our respondent used them in a literary ‘parallel’ five-characters form, i.e. they are formalised.

As with our previous DCT featuring consoling the victim of a scam, Willing (Offer) tends to be realised here only in [–SD] relationships where our respondents were apparently willing to help:

Requests (for information) mostly include ritualised inquiries about the other’s wellbeing. In (25) above the Request Laoshi, nin zuijin shenti hai hao ma? 老师, 您最近身体还好吗? (‘Teacher, are you [V form] feeling well, lately?’) is clearly a ritual query, since the raison ê’tre of consoling the other is that the other does not feel well. This sense of social meaning is also reflected in other Request realisations:

The fact that this Request (for information) is followed by a Suggest shows that it has a strong social load.

Similar to the scamming situation, Symphatise here is infrequent and is only used in the [–P,+SD] relationship. In (27), our respondent used the expression tai-kexi-le 太可惜了 (‘very regretful’), which is not used in any other relationships, i.e. it seems to be ‘reserved’ for distant contacts with no power.

4.2.5 Consoling the other for falling ill (English)

Table 5 shows the different speech acts across various role relationships:

As Table 5 shows, Sympathise is as frequent in our second English DCT as in the scam situation. Further, this speech act is also most frequently realised with the ritual expression ‘I’m/am sorry [for/to]’:

The Sympathise realisations above are clearly ritualised. As (30)–(32) show, Sympathise often co-occurs with Opines. Also, there are various Willing (Offer)-s, frequented in [–SD] situations as shown by (30) and (32).

In [–SD] relationships, another frequent speech act is Request (for information). In some [–P,–SD] utterances, the recipient is ‘bombarded’ with such Requests:

Unlike in the scamming situation, Request (for information) is here preferred over Willing (Offer) because our respondents were not medical experts, i.e. there was very little they could actually offer to the recipient.

4.2.6 Contrastive analysis and discussion of the findings

Figure 3 summarises the similarities and differences between our Chinese and English DCTs:

Figure 3:

Contrastive analysis of speech acts frequented in consoling the falling seriously ill in Chinese and English.

As Figure 3 shows, our Chinese and English DCTs show significant similarities when it comes to Willing (Offer) and Request (for information). However, our Chinese and English datasets also show noteworthy differences:

1. Unlike the English speakers, our Chinese respondents preferred Wish-Well and Suggest. The lack of Wish-Well in our English data is easy to explain: in English, Wish-Well tends to be realised in closing phases (see Edmondson et al. 2023), and our DCT scenario presented a situation where one’s interactant describes her difficult situation before the closing phase. However, as our Chinese DCT data shows, Wish-Well is a conventionalised part of the ritual of expressing sympathy in the event of illness. When it comes to Suggest, we interpreted the preference for this speech act by reflecting on the outcome of our scamming incident DCTs: it seems that this speech act is generally important in Chinese ritual sympathising.

2. Our English-speaking respondents preferred Sympathise and Opine. Similar to Suggest in our Chinese data, Sympathise in English seems to be an integral part of ritual sympathising, used in all role relationships unlike Sympathise in Chinese. Opines in our English DCT included the expression of negative views about the illness through which the effect of sympathy was boosted.

A noteworthy similarity between the scamming and illness DCTs concerns realisation patterns of Sympathise: in both Chinese datasets Sympathise is infrequent and non-ritualised, whereas in both English datasets it is frequent and ritualised.

4.2.7 Condoling (Chinese)

Table 6 shows the different speech acts across various role relationships:

Similar to our other Chinese DCTs, Suggest is by far the most frequent speech act in the ritual of condolence. Suggest is most often realised with the formula jie’ai 节哀 (lit. ‘suppress your distress’) and its full form jie’ai-shunbian 节哀顺变 (lit. ‘suppress your distress and adapt to the change’), an archaic expression, which can be dated back to the Confucian Classic Book of Rites (ca. 1^st century BC) where the following is mentioned:

喪禮哀戚之至也。節哀順變也。

The rites of funeral concern the ultimate of grief: they regulate grief and enable it to adapt to the change.

The consoling use of jie’ai-shunbian derives from this Classic: through the words jie’ai-shunbian the addressee is literally advised to follow the ritual of mourning and then adapt to the change in life caused by the loss. The following extracts illustrate uses of the jie’ai forms, along with other Suggest formulae such as baoyang-ziji 保养自己 (‘take care of yourself’):

Another formulaic Suggest expression, which some of our respondents used in [–P,–SD] and [–P,+SD] relationships, is shunji-ziran 顺其自然. While its English translation – ‘let nature take its course’ – may sound ‘cold and tactless’ for foreigners, for speakers of Chinese this expression, which originates in a historical Taoist work,^[2] refers to the philosophical principle of accepting changes brought about by nature. Along with such formulae, various respondents realised Suggest in non-formulaic ways:

While most Suggest realisations in our Chinese dataset are formulaic, we also observed several non-formalised uses, particularly in the [–SD] setting. Such uses always co-occur with formulaic Suggests:

Opine is another commonly used speech act, although it is much less frequent than Suggest. In all role relationships, participants provided various formulaic Opine realisations:

In extract (41) our respondent used the four-character condolence expressions sizhe-anxi 死者安息 (‘the dead should rest in peace’) and shengzhe-jianqiang 生者坚强 (‘the living should be strong’), in (42) the respondent provided the condolence formula shishi-wuchang 世事无常 (‘the matters of life are unpredictable’), and in (43) the condolence expression tiandu-yingcai 天妒英才 (‘heaven is jealous of talents’) is used. The frequency of such formulae shows that they are ritualised. We could also find a small number of non-formulaic Opines:

Similar to our other Chinese datasets, Willing (Offer) only occurs in [–SD] relationships. Extract (40) already illustrated a Willing (Offer) realisation in a [+P,–SD] case, and the following extract features a [–P,–SD] realisation:

Sympathise is infrequent in our data, only occurring in [–P] relationships in non-formulaic ways. (45) above already illustrated such a use.

4.2.8 Condoling (English)

Table 7 shows the different speech acts across various role relationships:

Similar to our other English DCT datasets, all our respondents frequented Sympathise in the ritual act of condoling. As elsewhere, they preferred the expression ‘I’m/am sorry [for/to]’:

Along with ‘sorry [for/to]’ expressions, various of our participants used formulae involving the word ‘condolence’:

The frequency and formulaic nature of such Sympathise realisations show that they are ritualised. In some cases, they co-occurred with non-formulaic Sympathise realisations:

Willing (Offer) occurred frequently, as (46) and (48) illustrate. Yet, many such realisations occurred in [–SD] settings, indicating that Willing (Offer) has at least as strong referential as symbolic meaning.

Opine either involved negative opinions about the difficulty of the situation, or positive opinions about the whereabouts and potential wellbeing of the deceased person:

Along with such Opines, Suggest also occurs in the form of religious utterances, as in (51) above.

4.2.9 Contrastive analysis and discussion of the findings

Figure 4 summarises the similarities and differences between our Chinese and English DCT datasets:

Figure 4:

Contrastive analysis of speech acts frequented in realising condolence in Chinese and English.

Figure 4 shows that what we found in the scamming and illness DCTs also applies to condolence: while in English expressing condolence is realised by default with the speech act Sympathise in all role relationships, in Chinese the default speech acts are Suggest and Opine, while Sympathise is rare and occurs only in [–P] relationships.