1.2 Research Design and Methodology

The paper studies the characteristics of Michelle’s using different person deixis, and her identity setting along with their empathy effect during her speech process. In general, the speaker tends to use numerous “we” which include the hearers in the speech, in order to shorten the distance between the audience and achieve better effects.

Through calculating the number of various kinds of person deixis, and analyzing each situation in which the person deixis is used, the paper discusses the usage of person deixis and the user’s identity setting together with its empathy effects. To sum up, the paper mainly employs quantitative, qualitative, and descriptive methods.

More profoundly, the paper can come out with some beneficial advice for public speaker and even helps more people to have a better verbal communication in daily life.

2 Literature Review

2.1 Deixis

Deixis, a term derived from Greek, means “pointing” or “indicating”. From traditional point of view, linguistics is the study of language use in contextual conditions, while deixis is regarded as the most obvious and direct reflection between the structure of language and context in which it is used (Levinson: 1987).

Hatch (1992) states deixis is a particular kind of reference that depends on the time and place of utterance and on the roles of addresser and the addressee in the utterance itself. According to Lyons (1977) and Fillmore (1975), deixis can be classified into five types: personal deixis, temporal deixis, spatial deixis, social deixis and discourse deixis. Levinson (1987) interprets personal deixis as the encoding of the role of participants in the speech event. 

He Ziran (2003) holds that the basic person deixis includes expressions which necessarily refer to participant roles in the speech event. And in recent years, Qin Hongwu (2001) points out that the antecedent referred by the person deixis may not be a constituent of the sentence, but a salient entity in mental representation of both the speaker and hearer. Ran Yongping (2007) illustrated the speaker's different choice of pragmatic stance can cause pragmatic empathy and de-empathy. Zhou and Niu (2006) found that the choice of person deixis can be influenced by the pragmatic distance or interpersonal relationship between the interlocutors.

Although there are lots of studies on deixis, most of them emphasized the definition and classification of deixis, only a few concern the person deixis and their empathy effects especially in political speech. 文献综述

2.2 Empathy in Linguistics Study

The term “empathy” translated from a German word, which origins in aesthetics. However, nowadays, the study of empathy has beyond the aesthetics field, becoming a research topic in the field of psychology, linguistics, rhetoric, intercultural communication and language teaching and so on. 

2.2.1 Empathy in Functional Syntax

The notion of empathy was firstly introduced into the linguistics field by Japanese linguistician Susumu Kuno (1987). In his point of view, empathy means the speaker put himself or herself into the situation when he or she narrates an event or a state. “Simply, that is, the speaker conveys the message standing in the angle of the hearer, in order to make the hearer understand, while the hearer receive the utterance standing in the angle of the speaker, in order to get across of the message accurately. In Kuno’s opinion, he compares the speaker to a motion picture director, and the objects related to the empathy to the director's shooting angle”. When the speaker narrates events and actions or states”(Kuno 1987), he or she must go through a process of selecting a “point of view” or a “camera angle”, which makes the speaker definitely, has a close or distant relationship between the participants in the speech event, and such relationship is often reflected in the syntax structure. Thus, the closer the relation is, the higher the empathetic value the speaker towards the participants will be, and it works the other way as well.