Empathic interjection rejoinders (on the material of the French language)

The article considers the use of interjections both in an empathic utterance as its component and separately, using the speech act analysis and contextual analysis. Psychologically, empathy means deep penetration into the emotional state of an interlocutor by way of feeling in a similar way. Verbal empathy suggests explicating such understanding and expressing psychological support to the interlocutor. Empathic utterances are singled out due to the presence of "emotional infection". We refer empathic utterances to both expressives, such as the ritual speech acts of greeting, praise, condolence, etc. and the illocutionary types of psychological support, such as sympathy, calming, dissuasion, encouragement. The two main spheres of verbal empathy are co-feeling which results from negative events connected with the interlocutor and rejoicing which results from positive events in the interlocutor's life. Co-feeling is represented by the illocutionary types of empathic understanding, sympathy, calming, dissuasion, encouragement, etc., while rejoicing includes the speech acts of greeting, praise and rejoicing (as a concrete action). Many interjections are an integral part of empathic response - Ah! Oh! Oh là là! Hm... Ae-Ae! Mon Dieu! Ah bon?! Shh... Chut! etc. The article examines the empathic content and the structure of French interjections used in empathic speech acts mentioned above. All in all, interjections are used in seven empathic illocutionary types out of ten, with the exception of dissuasion, justification and condolence. Besides, the investigation revealed that an empathic speech act may be represented by several interjections and, on the contrary, the same interjection may be used to explicate several speech acts. Moreover, some of the empathic interjections possess a high degree of compatibility with other empathic speech acts.