Empathy strategy in religious discourse and its language expression

Statement of the problem. The article analyzes the empathy strategy in religious discourse represented by holiday sermons of the three Abraham religions (Judaism, Christian (Orthodox), and Islam). The purpose of the article is to define the elements constituting the language expression of ‘empathy' phenomenon, to describe the empathy strategy, communicative tactics and moves in the holiday sermons. Methodology (materials and methods). The methodology consists in component analysis of lexical meaning of the word, discourse-analysis, pragmatic analysis of communicative strategies and tactics. Research results. On the basis of the component analysis of the lexemes constituting the lexico-semantic field ‘soperezhvanie' (empathy) it was concluded that empathy phenomenon falls into two elements: ‘soradovanie' (corejoicing) and ‘sostradanie' (compassion). The analysis of communicative strategies and tactics in religious discourse resulted in defining that empathy strategy is implemented through the following communicative tactics and moves: co-rejoicing - congratulation (moves: address, congratulation, wish), event importance highlight (moves: exception status creation, appeal to authority), pride building (moves: appeal to history, appeal to ethnicity, appeal to unity, achievement description, praise); compassion - appeal to fellow help (move: explanation), appeal to self-improvement (move: comparison, recommendation), appeal to enemy element defeat (move: enemy element identification), complaint (move: deprivation and adversity description).