ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the word “empathy” from the perspective of evaluative language, using English Web 2020 as its source of linguistic data. More specifically, it investigates the use of the word “empathy” from the point of view of Attitude, probably the most suitable System within Appraisal theory to combine with corpus tools, i.e. by extracting and analyzing the use of adjectives modifying the word “empathy” in English Web 2020. The chapter examines adjectives both as Classifiers (identifying the type of empathy being discussed) and as Epithets (evaluating empathy qualitatively), in relation with Appreciation (evaluating objects), Affect (evaluating feelings), and Judgement (evaluating people, often in a moral sense).
