Les rapports entre empathie et énonciation à l’aune de la réflexivité du/de la chercheur.euse. Implications méthodologiques à partir d’une étude sur la communication sociale par affiches

Abstract

The paper addresses some methodological issues related to the linguistic study of empathy. Given the fact that empathic connections are both biological and cultural, I argue that some messages are more likely to trigger an empathic reaction according to the personal background of the analyst. In this regard, the concept of reflexivity, understood as an overlooking exam of the possible influences of one’s subjectivity in research practices (due to social and personal factors), is worth being considered. The study aims to verify this hypothesis and to question the role and place of subjectivity while researching discursive matters by analyzing two posters from two different social campaigns, one against sexual harassment and the other against smoking. The linguistic analysis shows that the application of linguistic criteria and discursive concepts (deixis, linguistic construction of points of view) enables to identify the use of the same strategies in meaning construction, regardless the higher sensibility we can have towards sexual harassment which may facilitate the decoding of the empathic communication strategy. In conclusion, when subjectivity is contextualized within a specific theoretical frame and opened to comparison with other data, it may become a useful tool in exploring corpora and therefore provide meaningful insights without undermining the rigorousness of the analysis.