A Conversation Analysis Of Requests In Bargaining

With the increasing upward trend in prices, bargaining is getting more and more important. In daily life, it is a process of verbal and informal negotiation about prices with the aim of reaching a mutual satisfactory deal for buyers and sellers. During this process, we can find a lot of interesting language phenomena that deserve our attention, and the request may be a prominent and special one among them. The inefficient realization of request and poor language skills may result in an unsuccessful bargaining.Uttering a request is one of the most common behaviors in our daily life. Although request has long been a hot issue for researchers for several decades at home and abroad, it is often narrowly defined as a speech act in pragmatics and other linguistic fields. Rarely are there any researches studied as an activity or as a daily-organized event under the new discipline of conversation analysis. To promote effective communication and improve the mutual understanding between buyers and sellers, the studies on requests from conversation analytical approach is of great significance.Based on 150 audio-recorded cases of bargaining in shops and markets in 7 cities in China, the thesis attempts to take the conversational analytic approach to conduct a descriptive study on the sequence organizations, designing turns and regular patterns of requests. The research shows that requests in bargaining can be made up of two phases:the initiation of requests and the response of requests. Owing to the fact that the initiations by buyers are much more frequently used than by sellers in our data, moreover, it is found that the patterns are stable no matter who initiates the request, so we mainly probe into the initiation by buyers as a representative mode. We find two patterns are usually employed during the process, namely, the declarative form and the interrogative form, within which buyers usually employ the former in five designing patterns, while the latter in three designing ones. And during the phase of response, there are often two ways for requests: acceptance and refusal, which is going to be analyzed in details in the thesis from the perspective of the preference organization. Besides, some factors that have a notable impact on the realization of a successful request are also discussed accordingly.All in all, request is of importance in daily bargaining. Through analyzing the request data in bargaining, the study finds out the detailed features of this common and interesting language phenomenon in bargaining with conversation analysis method. It is hoped that the thesis can guide us to maintain harmonious relationship between buyers and sellers in bargaining.