浅析商务英语谈判中的语用学也原则及其运用.docx

A Brief Analysis on the Principles of Pragmatics and Its Application in Business English Negotiation
浅析商务英语谈判中的语用学也原则及其运用
摘要
随着中国加入世界贸易组织后各个经济领域日益对外开放，“全球化”或“一体化”已经成为当今商务领域出现频率最高的词语。 全球化已经成功地把世界上各个不同地区紧密的连接成为一个动态的整体，沟通和谈判在各个商务领域发挥着至关重要的作用。国际业务出现了前所未有的增长，随之便带动了不同语言之间的沟通和谈判。与日俱增的商务谈判技巧深刻的反映了语用学原则在其过程中的运用。
针对当前研究的现状，本论文试图应用语用学相关理论对商务英语谈判过程中的一些问题进行了语用学分析。在商务英语谈判的有关理论的基础上，从语用学视角对其进行分析，以期寻求更好的把握谈判过程中的策略。
本文由四章组成。第一章主要介绍了本文的研究背景和本文主要研究的问题及其意义。第二章主要讲了语用学中的合作原则以及合作原则在商务英语谈判过程中的应用问题。第三章主要讲了语用学中的礼貌原则以及礼貌原则在商务英语谈判中应用问题。第四章是结语。
希望该研究能够给商务谈判者提供一些技巧和指导，帮助他们建立良好的谈判关系。并帮助他们运用恰当的语言策略去创造一种和谐合作的关系进而推动谈判的顺利进行，最终实现商务英语谈判的高效和双赢。

关键词: 商务英语谈判; 合作原则; 礼貌原则

Abstract
The Chinese economy keeps opening up to the world after China’s accession into the World Trade Organization, and the buzzword in business nowadays has been either “globalization” or “integration”. Globalization has successfully woven different parts of the world into a dynamic entity where communization and negotiation have been playing a major role in all kinds of business transactions. The unprecedented growth of international business has resulted in an increased volume of business English negotiation among them. The importance of the pragmatics principles in today’s business environment is reflected in the growing body of negotiation strategies.
This thesis is composed of four chapters. Chapter one provides an introduction of the background, propose and significance of the thesis. In chapter two, based on the overview of business English negotiation and the application of pragmatics and principles during the process of business English negotiation. The chapter three is called the politeness principles and the application in the business English negotiation. And the last chapter is conclusion.
It is hoped that this research will provide some guidelines for business negotiations to get a good command of pragmatics principles as well as the application about it. And the author assists them in creating a cooperative relationship with each other through employing proper language strategies and finally improves the efficiency of business negotiation and realizes the long-term win-win negotiation.

Key Words: Business English Negotiation; Cooperation Principles; Politeness Principles.

Contents
摘要 i
Abstract ii
ChapterⅠIntroduction 1
1.1 Research Background 1
1.2 Significance of the Study and Methodology 2
1.3 Research Question 3
1.4 Structure of the Thesis 3
ChapterⅡCooperative Principles 4
2.1 Introduction 4
2.2 Cooperative Principles 6
2.3 The Quantity Principle and Business English Negotiation 6
2.4 The Quality Principle and Business English Negotiation 10
2.5 The Relation Principle and Business English Negotiation 11
Chapter Ⅲ Politeness Principle 12
3.1 Introduction 12
3.2 Politeness Principle and the Negotiation 12
Chapter Ⅳ Conclusion 16
4.1 Main Findings 16
4.2 Limitations and Suggestions for Further Study 16
Bibliography 17

A Brief Analysis on the Principles of Pragmatics and Its Application in Business English Negotiation

ChapterⅠIntroduction

1.1 Research Background
A preliminary reading of the relevant literature on the principles of pragmatics and the application in business English negotiation make us realize that some problems in previous researches remain to be solved.
First, the comment about the language arts in business English negotiation is not clear enough.
Second, how to right use the pragmatics principles in business English negotiation.
Third, there will be a further development about the pragmatics principles in the business English negotiation.
With the global economic integration, the international business activities are more and more frequent. The business activities of China in international affairs are also more frequent after being the member of WTO. And in the process of interaction, the business English negotiation becomes more and more important. Some language behavior about question, request, to persuade and threat or some others like these have existed for a long time. It is the application of pragmatics principles.
1.2 Significance of the Study and Methodology
This thesis intends to probe into the essence of business negotiation across borders under the guide of pragmatics theory, making a tentative study of language strategy and its application by taking pragmatics principles theory as its rational. A conclusion may be drawn that although cross-cultural business negotiation is influenced by cultural difference. And it also can be linked to the pragmatics principles application in the business English negotiation. Not only that but also it can be facilitated by selecting relevant language strategies to make it possible that both parties can have more opportunities to reach an agreement. Business English negotiators make use of the different language strategies strategically to achieve their communicative intentions. However, different strategies may bring about different results in business English negotiations: a win-lose result, a win-win result or lose-lose result. Generally speaking, language strategies play a very important role in determining the outcome of business English negotiation. The basic claim in this thesis is that there are some general language strategies that can be employed in cross-cultural business English negotiations despite varieties of cultural and social backgrounds. For reasons of keeping business secrets and profits, business companies are always reluctant to disclose their files of business English negotiations in detail. After many unsuccessful attempts to obtain firsthand materials, the language data I have collected hereinafter are limited to second-hand materials among the recent publications related to business English negotiation. Since the negotiation strategies play an important role in negotiation and the decision on strategies is governed by cultural diversity and language strategies is significant. This thesis may be helpful for negotiators to deal with the cross-cultural business English negotiations in a more flexible way by selecting language strategies and enhancing awareness of cultural differences. That is to say that the application of the pragmatics principles during the business English negotiation has become more and more important.
1.3 Research Question
This thesis will have some comment on the application of pragmatics principles during the business English negotiation. And the pragmatics principles will be explained in detail. The main issues are business English negotiation among the concrete language environment.
1.4 Structure of the Thesis
This thesis consists of four chapters: chapter one, an introduction of this thesis, centers on the background, significance and arrangement of the research. Based on an overview of cross-cultural business English negotiation and application of pragmatics principles during the negotiation, chapter two elaborates the different people’s ideas which are prevailing in previous research in this filed. The author future points outs the limitations of cross-cultural theories in conciliating negotiation disagreements and therefore puts forward the application of pragmatics principles. Chapter three is the core of the thesis. First, this chapter reviews in detail cooperative principles, politeness theory and relevance theory, on which the research of this thesis is based. Then, it explores collected materials and analyzes the application of pragmatic theories in business negotiation so as to avoid pragmatics failure. The author holds the view that pragmatics principles serve as underlying principles in facilitating business English negotiation across borders and that a prospective agreement may be reached by the application of language strategies in the business English negotiations. And the chapter is the conclusion. What is made of the main findings and the limitation and the suggestion for further study?

ChapterⅡCooperative Principles

2.1 Introduction
Pragmatics is a newly arising discipline. The modern usage of the term pragmatics is attributable to the American philosopher Charles Morris, who defined semiotics as the use of signs governed by syntactic, semantic and pragmatic rules in 1937. According to him pragmatics is the study of “the relation of signs to interpreters”(1938:6). Since then, pragmatics has been developed with enthusiasm by philosophers and linguists alike. It entered an especially meaningful phase in 1962 when J.L.Austin’s contribution to the subject was published under the title How to Do Things with words (Austin: 1962), which showed that, when using language, people do not just or write to one another but rather they perform actions, they do things, usually in contexts that combine linguistic and nonlinguistic elements, part of the element in which they communicate consisting of the knowledge, beliefs and assumptions of all concerned. Thus appears the first major pragmatic theory------speech act theory.
By the early 1980s pragmatics had been generally accepted as one of the basic branches of linguistics together with phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.
What is the pragmatics then? Scholars have given their definitions in different ways. You can even find nearly ten possibilities in Levinson’s “Pragmatics (1983:6-27). The following are some of them:
Definition 1 Pragmatics is the study of those relations between language and context that are grammaticalized, or encoded in the structure of a language. (Levinson: 1983)
Definition 2 Pragmatics is study of the relations between language and context that are basic to an account of language understanding. (Levinson: 1983)
Definition 3 Pragmatics is the study of the ability of language users to pair sentence with the context in which they would be appropriate. (Levinson: 1983)
Definition 4 Pragmatics can be defined as the study of how utterances have meanings in situations. (Leech: 1983)
Definition 5 Pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning as communicate by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader). (Yule: 1996)
Making an analysis on these definitions, scholars find that each is to be found inadequate and only dose more than sketch a tang of possible scopes for the field of pragmatics. It is by no means easy to provide a fully satisfactory one. And it is meaningless to judge which one is the most appropriate since each is made based on the different emphasis and diction. However, there are two essential concepts in the science of pragmatics, so much so that no definition can ignore them: meaning and context. Therefore, pragmatics can be generally definite as the study of language in use with meaning and context as the essential concepts.
The interest in pragmatics in recent years grows rapidly. According to Levinson (193:35-40), it is partly due to some historical reasons: it is a reaction to Chomsky’s treatment of language as an abstract device, or mental ability, dissociable from the uses, users and functions of language. The second reason is that as knowledge of the syntax, phonology and semantics of various languages has increased, some specific phenomena occur that can naturally be described by resource to contextual concepts instead of the traditional linguistic branches. The third important reason is the growing realization that there is a very substantial gap between current linguistic theories of language and accounts of linguistic communication. Finally people have interest in pragmatics is due to the possibility that significant functional explanation can be offered for linguistic facts.
Anyway, pragmatics gives people hope establish the effects of the uses of language on language structure. Pragmatics theories are applied to many areas. And the cooperative principle among the pragmatics principles is a main aspect in the concrete process in the business English negotiation.
2.2 Cooperative Principles
Grice notice that in daily conversations people do not usually say things directly but tend to imply them. For example, when A and B are talking about their mutual friend C, who is now working in a bank, and A asks B how C is getting on, B might answer” Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been to prison yet.” Here B certainly implied something, though he did not say it explicitly. Grice argues that we can make a distinction between what B said in this case and what he implied suggested or meant. To make the point clearer, we can have a look at a Chinese example from a film. A boy says to a girl“你不戴眼镜的时候很漂亮”，and the girl immediately responds“我戴眼镜的时候一定很丑了”. Now the boy may have reason to deny that the girl’s interpretation is what he said. But he may not be able to deny in all fairness that implication, which we touched on in the section on logical semantics, Grice coined the term implicative. And he explored the question how people manage to convey implicative, which is not explicitly expressed.
His answer is that there is some regularity in conversation. “Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction” (1975:45). In other words we seem to follow some principle like the following; “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged”. And this principle is known as the cooperative principle or CP for short.
2.3 The Quantity Principle and Business English Negotiation
The quantity principle is to say that your language should make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange) and do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
As we know that communication is done through two approaches: verbal and nonverbal means negotiations. Some verbal strategies can be used successfully and effectively in some negotiations while others cannot be used in the same situation. As we have discussed in chapter one, there are two types of business English negotiation: win-win and win-lose negotiation. In a win-win business negotiation, in order to maintain a long-term cooperative business relationship with each other, negotiators may use some win-win strategies instead of win-lose strategies. The most commonly used strategies for a win-win outcome are the quantity principle and some other pragmatics principles.
Grice’s cooperative principles (CP) and his maxims in short are what participants have to do in or order to communicate in an efficient, rational, cooperative way: they should speak sincerely, relatively, and clearly and provide sufficient