Abstract: Empathy incorporates cognitive, emotional, behavioural and other psychological activities. It is an innate concept of human beings to coexist with others. Empathy is affected by context and object. From the perspective of lexical semantics, context could be preset by construing relevant information among nouns, and object could be probed into by investigating frequency of nouns. This paper built two comparable corpora, collecting poverty-related news in China and the United States respectively, to compare the differences in the frequency and the categories of nouns. The results indicate that there are differences in both the contexts and objects of poverty-related news between China and the United States. Significant differences are observed in the frequency of family member vocabulary. The findings suggest that common nouns, integrated with the assistance of index lines, can be taken as a pathway of discourse analysis which may hold the potential to explore the main contexts and objects of given topics in news reports.