模糊语在国际商务谈判中的语用功能研究.doc

On Pragmatic Functions of Vague Language in International Business Negotiation

Abstract
In general, language in business negotiation is believed to be precise, but actually, pragmatic application of vagueness is a common phenomenon in business negotiation. As early as 1965, Zadeh (1965) issued a “fuzzy set”, and for the first time it brought the “fuzzy” concept into language areas.
Business negotiation is a complex process. Nowadays, vague language in business negotiation is commonly used. The thesis tries to study the application of vague language and its functions from the pragmatic point of view in international business negotiation. Through analysis, it manifests that negotiators can employ vague language such as vague words, hedges, and syntactic vagueness to satisfy certain communicative purposes, which reveals the functions of vague language, namely being flexible, giving right amount of information, being persuasive, self-protection and being polite.
Appropriate use of vagueness can help negotiators to communicate much more smoothly and achieve their goals successfully. Vague language in business negotiation provided the basis for negotiation theory and linguistic methods to resolve problems in negotiation.

Key words: vague language; vagueness; pragmatic functions; business negotiation

摘 要
人们普遍认为商务谈判中的语言应该是准确简洁的，而不是模糊不清的。可事实恰恰相反，模糊语言确实广泛存在于商务谈判中。早在1965年，查德发表了《模糊集》，首次把“模糊”的概念引入了语言领域. 但事实上，从语用学角度研究商务谈判中的模糊语言还有待于进一步的探索。
商务谈判是一个涉及诸多方面内容的复杂过程。现在，模糊语广泛应用在商务谈判中。本文旨在从语用学角度研究模糊语在国际商务谈判中的应用及其作用。通过分析研究，发现谈判人员在谈判过程中可以使用模糊语言，例如模糊语，模糊限制语，和句法模糊，达到一定的交际目的，即增强谈判语言的灵活性；传达适当的信息量；增强说服力；自我保护以及礼貌功能。
适当的运用模糊语有助于谈判者交流更加顺畅，从而成功地实现目标。模糊语在商务谈判中提供了谈判理论的基础还有解决形式语言中的方法。

关键词：模糊语；模糊；语用功能；商务谈判

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On the Pragmatic Function of Vague Language in International Business Negotiation
1. Introduction
Since China joined WTO (World Trade Organization), international business has already been developed dramatically. How to take good advantage of language in the business negotiation is a serious question to be discussed. Vague language is a common phenomenon and occurs frequently in language communication. More and more people use it in business occasions, so that, it plays an important role in international business negotiation.
Language in business negotiation is believed to be clear and accurate lest disputes would arise from inexactness. However, vague language extensively exists in business negotiation and it renders a new vision for the research. Channell (2000:3) argues that “vagueness in language is neither all ‘bad’ nor all ‘good’. What matters is that vague language is used appropriately.” That is the key to use vague language in business negotiation.
This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one gives a brief introduction of the whole thesis and the structure of the thesis will be introduced. Chapter two is the review of previous studies about business negotiation and vague language, and in this chapter, some related terms of vague language will be discussed as well. In chapter three, it presents pragmatic realization of vagueness in business negotiation, and analyzes the reasons for the existence of vagueness in business negotiation. In chapter four, the author shows the pragmatic functions of vagueness in business negotiation by using many examples in the real occasion. Finally, there is a conclusion of the whole passage, and it will show the core findings of the research.

2. Literature Review
Vagueness is a very common phenomenon in communication. However, little attention was paid to it until Peirce (1902), the originator of the notion of vagueness in language, and he focused his attention on natural language. In this chapter, previous studies related to vagueness will be reviewed. Firstly, previous studies of business negotiation will be analyzed. Secondly, it will study the previous studies of vague language. Finally, a number of terms related to the research will be clarified and explained，such as vagueness, fuzziness, generality and ambiguity.

2.1 Previous studies of business negotiation
Business negotiation become a hot topic for the researchers with the development of economic globalization and world integration. Numerous books and articles have been written about business negotiation. They have studied business negotiation from different perspectives, such as culture, strategies, interpretation, so on and so forth. The author realizes that making a summary on that topic is very essential for the present study. Lewicki (1994) gives us a survey of business negotiation. He states that researchers have increasing taken interdisciplinary approaches to understanding, interpreting, and integrating negotiation theory and practice. And these interdisciplinary efforts have widen the scope of the negotiation phenomenon, they cover psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, political science, and mathematics, which have all taken different theoretical and conceptual perspectives on negotiation. And these famous literature materials on business negotiation are as follows: Marketing by Agreement: A Cross-Cultural Approach to Business Negotiations by McCall.J.B. & Warrington.M.B. (1984); Successful International Business Negotiation by Robert T.Moran & William GStripp (1991); Cross-Cultural Business Negotiations by Hendon, Donald W., Rebecca Angeles and Paul Herbig (1996); Negotiation by Roy J.Lewicki (1994); International Business Negotiation: Actors, Structure/Process, Value by Peter Berton, Hiroshi Kimura & I.William Zartman (1999); International Negotiation by Jeffrey Edmund Curry (2004). Fuzziness Vagueness Generality Ambiguity by Qiao Zhang (1998). Yu Yong Xue Gai Lun by He Ziran (2003). All of them have made huge contributions to the study of vague language and business negotiation. It will be referred in the following thesis.
In China, especially after China’s entry into WTO, more and more Chinese scholars realize that it is of great importance to make an ESP (English for Special Purpose) study on international business negotiation. Zeng Wenxiong (2002) discusses the pragmatic strategies in business negotiation, i. e. polite appropriateness, implicative and euphemism, humor, vagueness. And effective methods are put forward to raise learners’ pragmatic awareness, and to develop their pragmatic strategy. Chen Xirong (2001) states the necessity for the business negotiators to apply the pragmatic strategy in business negotiation and the positive pragmatic strategy in the negotiation is also discussed from three aspects: politeness and appropriateness maxims, tactful and humorous, and implicit and vague expressions.

2.2 Previous studies of vague language
Crystal and Davy (1975) study vagueness from a pragmatic point of view. They point out that the choice of a vague item is deliberate to maintain the atmosphere. Channell (2000) describes the pragmatic use of vague language in detail. As to the reasons why people use vague language in communication, she answers that politeness is one of the reasons.
In China, the concept of pragmatic vagueness is advanced by Prof. He Ziran (1996). In his opinion, vagueness is rather a pragmatic phenomenon than a semantic one and hence head vacates conducting a dynamic investigation from the pragmatic perspective on the basis of affirming the achievements made by the static researches. His early explorations on pragmatic vagueness encompasses all the vague concepts that cannot be analyzed by two-valued logic, including fuzziness, indeterminacy, probability, ambiguity, and generality, etc. Different types of pragmatic vagueness, such as continuum type, categorical type, appraisal type, and hedging type are also presented. He argues that pragmatic vagueness can make utterance more appropriate and more tactful in certain contexts. To sum up, although there is no general agreement about what vague language is and what definite role it can play in discourse, all the above studies commonly show that vague language mainly functions pragmatically. “Language only has meanings by virtue of its use”(Channell, 2000:29).

2.3 Clarification of some related terms
In fact, there is no unified opinion on the differences among the four linguistic conceptions, i.e. vagueness, fuzziness, generality and ambiguity. Lots of linguists made great efforts for this purpose only to find they were confused as to distinguish vagueness from the other three similar terms, which all share the same characteristic of indeterminacy. In this thesis, the author prefers to use the concept of vagueness because it is an intrinsic characteristic of natural language which is superior to the other three concepts of connotation as well as denotation.

2.3.1 Vagueness versus fuzziness
Strictly speaking, fuzziness is distinct from vagueness; however, vagueness and fuzziness have been used interchangeably by some researchers. The term fuzzy is derived from fuzzy mathematics developed by Zadeh who suggests that fuzziness can be formally handled in terms of a fuzzy set, a class of entities with a continuum of grades of membership. But other linguists like Russell, Black, Ullmann, Burns, Channell, Deese, etc. All use the term vagueness instead of fuzziness.
Actually, fuzziness differs from vagueness in that it is not simply a list of possible related interpretation derived from a vague expression. Fuzziness is inherent in the sense that it has no clear-cut referential boundary and is not resolved with resort to context. Fuzziness is one of the near synonyms of vagueness, and both are equivalent in a broad sense. Fuzziness emphasizes unclear boundaries of category identifiers while vagueness may refer to all kinds of uncertain, indefinite, unclear things. In some sense, the term vagueness covers the meaning of fuzziness, so in this thesis vagueness is used instead of fuzziness.

2.3.2 Vagueness versus generality
Generality is different from vagueness. Zhang Qiao (1998) states that “the meaning of an expression is general in the sense that it does not specify certain details; generality is a matter of unspecified.” For example, the meaning of “John has got a degree” is general because it does not specify whether John has got an art degree or a science degree, or a degree of master or doctor. The expression does not give such certain details.

2.3.3 Vagueness versus ambiguity
Compared with other similar terms, ambiguity has a more established definition, though some people often use ambiguous examples to explain vagueness. Zhang Qiao (1998) defines ambiguity as “expressions which have more than one semantically unrelated meaning; in other words, an expression is ambiguous if it has several paraphrases which are not paraphrases of each other.”
Traditionally, ambiguity has been identified where a sentence has two or more competing but distinct meaning attached to it, while for vagueness, distinct meaning cannot be identified. To quote one example that many linguists mentioned to explain ambiguity: “Flying planes can be dangerous.” It does not tell whether to fly a plane can be dangerous or the planes which are flying can be dangerous.
And ambiguity is rare in actual texts, because contextual clues generally make clear which meaning is appropriate. But vagueness is possible in many cases because it expresses one meaning which is not clear or distinct.

3. Pragmatic Realization of Vagueness in Business Negotiation
3.1 Reasons for the Existence of Vagueness in Business Negotiation
As the author has mentioned, vague language exists extensively in people’s daily life.
Crystal and Davy (1975) give four reasons for vagueness:

a. memory loss—the speaker forgets the correct word
b. the language has no suitable exact word, or the speaker does not know it
c. the subject of the conversation is not such that it requires precision, and an approximation or characterization will do.
d. the choice of a vague item is deliberate to maintain the atmosphere.

In business negotiation, the reasons of vague language that exists can be explained objectively and subjectively.
Objectively speaking, vagueness in the real world is omnipresent. Many things, phenomena and characters in the world form a continuum, which makes it quite difficult to make clear boundaries among them, such as color spectrum, temperatures, age and so on. Vagueness arises from the indeterminacy in the world. For example, physicians consider spectrum as a continuum of different wavelengths, in which there are no clear boundary between the neighbor colors. At the same time, human brains, a products of nature, is featured by vague thinking. People cannot compartmentalize the exact boundary between red and orange, etc. Therefore, people turn to vague language as a result of vagueness in external world and internal human thinking.
Subjectively speaking, vague language finds full reasons for its existence in business negotiation. One case is that the speaker is unable to be more precise. The speaker may use vague language due to memory loss or lack of relevant knowledge, just as the first two reasons proposed by Crystal and Davy. The other case is that the speaker is unwilling to be more precise for certain reasons, just as the last two reasons proposed by them. Business negotiation is a very complicated process, when you reply to some questions is beyond your authority or when it is inconvenient to give a reply on some issues, vague language should be used to deal with; or to avoid face-to-face conflict, it is the most effective way for us to use vague language. The necessity of adopting vague language in business negotiation lies in promotion of business relations and realization of commercial purposes. Negotiators also adopt vague language when it is unnecessary to be exact or when specific purpose must be achieved. The merits of vagueness help to eliminate absoluteness, directness and openness of language. With possibly less mistakes, negotiators take the initiative firmly in their hands.
Negotiators may use vague language to describe, to suggest, to complain, to praise, to refuse, to cover, to concede, to inquire, etc. It can function as a weapon, a lubricant, and a disguise, etc. The high frequency of vague language’s adoption in business negotiation shows it is favored and preferred by negotiators, who can not afford to ignore the effect of vague language.

3.2 Pragmatic realization of vagueness in business negotiation
Based on the Reasons for the existence of vagueness in business negotiation, it is concluded that vagueness in business negotiation can be realized in the following method:

3.2.1 Vague words
In the real world, almost all physical objects have characteristics that vary continuously, not discreetly, so there exist large quantities of entities for which there is no clear-cut boundary