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Pronoun TA as a facilitator of empathy in Chinese digital narratives


 This article presents findings pertaining to digital you-narratives in which ungendered third person Chinese
 pronoun ta is embedded. The study asks what implications the script choice ta, as opposed to gendered
 他 ta ‘he’ and 她 ta ‘she’, has for the facilitation of
 situational empathy when used in conjunction with specific and generic 你 ni ‘you’. The study draws on 131 digital texts from celebrity verified accounts on
 social media platform Sina Weibo in October 2015. From a Discourse Analytical perspective, the study utilizes pragmatic and
 textual approaches under a constructivist narrative analysis framework to examine the facilitative role of ta in relation to
 empathy invoked in readers. The study proposes that ta is a pragmatic resource used to facilitate the
 co-construction of emergent narratives based on situational empathy. The implications of said findings are discussed along with
 future avenues of research.