For a sentient being A to be empathic with an entity B means that A can identify with B, i.e. can imagine to be B and feel what B feels. A is a human being; in linguistics, it is the speaker. B may, in principle, be anything, although the empathy hierarchy determines diminishing degrees of empathy.
Human beings are empathic with human beings, less so with animals, not normally with lifeless things, not at all with abstract objects. These grades of empathy manifest themselves in linguistic structure. In various areas of grammar, preference is given to entities at higher levels of the empathy hierarchy.1
| 1st | 2nd | ||||||||
| SAP | bystander | ||||||||
| present | absent | ||||||||
| in speech situation | |||||||||
| human | non-human | ||||||||
| higher animal | lower animal | ||||||||
| animate | inanimate | ||||||||
| individual | mass | ||||||||
| thing | place | ||||||||
| object | abstract | ||||||||
Manifestations of empathy in linguistic structure are manifold. A prominent one is in the pronominal system of many languages: There is an interrogative pronoun ‘who’ that singles out human beings and one other pronoun ‘what’ for the entire rest. In the subsystem of personal pronouns, gender distinctions apply to human beings, sometimes to higher animals, too, but not to entities lower on the hierarchy.
1 The break between animate and inanimate entities has occasioned the alternative term ‘animacy hierarchy’, which is, however, meant to cover the entire hierarchy, too. The linguistic term ‘empathy hierarchy’ presupposes a valency conversion in the terms ‘empathic’ and ‘empathy’ since what is here more or less empathic are not entities A but entities B. Entities at the bottom of the hierarchy are anempathic.