A Study Of Pragmatic Strategy On Sino-US Business Negotiation Within Adaptation Theory

After entering into WTO, China's economic activities with America become more frequent, especially in the last decade of 20th century. Globalization is spreading all over the world, making the Sino-US business negotiation more prosperous. From January to June of 2010, China's exports to the United States are 6.7%, increasing 35.7%; the United States imports from China are 17.7%, increasing 20.4%. Since joining G20, China's economy is developing sustainably, which have gained effective results. In 2010, China's economy keeps fast and steady development tendency, and grows up 11.9% in the first quarter. China has always paid attention to the sustainability of growth; the deficit range is about 3% of GDP. In 2009, the total exports of goods reduce 16%, while the total retail sales of consumer goods increase 17%, the social fixed asset investment increase 30%. Since this year, China's trade surplus continued to sharply reduce, project payments tend to balance, and the tendency of economic sustainable development is becoming stronger. Sino-US business negotiation is a kind of spoken communication, both parties language users use different linguistic styles to fulfill different communicative aims. Therefore, the successful business communication between China and America, to a large extent, lies in the application of pragmatic strategies. In the previous studies, some learners have studied the application of pragmatic strategies to Sino-US business negotiations from different perspectives, for example, vagueness strategy, cooperation strategy, politeness strategy and so on. All of these studies enriched the literature of pragmatic strategies and also supplied help for these Sino-US negotiators. However, we all know that all of these studies were based on some pragmatic theories, it is no doubt that they tended to regard certain speech acts as their research objects. Therefore, the findings from these studies could not provide a complete guidance and help for different pragmatic situations during the process of Sino-US business negotiation. Regarding Adaptation Theory of pragmatic perspective as its theoretical basis, the thesis expresses the application of the theory as a pragmatic strategy in Sino-US business negotiations. The aims of the study are to improve pragmatic adaptation awareness and competence of Sino-US negotiators in cross-cultural business communication.With the help of Adaptation Theory, the thesis mainly focuses on the application of adaptation strategy to Sino-US business negotiations from two perspectives, communicative context and language structure of adaptability. According to communicative context, the thesis explains the extra linguistic factors in Sino-US negotiations, such as the mental world, the social world and the physical world of Sino-US negotiators. Firstly, as to the mental world, the study discusses the personality worldview, the emotions of Sino-US negotiators. Secondly, as to the social world, the thesis emphasizes the cultural factors, social factors and their great impact on the language use of Sino-US negotiation communication. Thirdly, as to the physical world, the thesis focuses on the role and impact of the nonverbal behaviors in Sino-US negotiation. The thesis also focuses on discussing adaptation to language structure, such as, sound, word and syntactic structure.The thesis makes use of the methodology of quantitative research and qualitative research in Sino-US business negotiations. In order to produce effective communication, the thesis suggests that Sino-US negotiators should adapt to the mental world, the social world and the physical world of language users in the process of linguistic choices, where knowing differences in cross-cultural business communication and holding cultural knowledge are the main point for negotiators to carry out adaptation strategy. Furthermore, the thesis points out that negotiation English, which belongs to the scope of business register, has its special pragmatic features. In terms of sound, Sino-US negotiators need to understand the phonetic rules of tone, intonation and stress, meanwhile, they also need to understand different pragmatic functions and meanings which are brought about by their few changes. Furthermore, as to lexicon, Sino-US negotiators should understand the importance of technical terms and compliments, because they have their own special meaning in business negotiations. Finally, as to syntax, Sino-US negotiators should understand different tenses and voices to express different meanings.In a word, the thesis argues that Sino-US negotiators should make linguistic choices which are adaptable to every structural level for fulfilling communicative results as expected.The thesis consists of six parts. Chapter One is the brief introduction. The author states the motive and methodology to choose the topic to study.In Chapter Two, the author makes an overall consideration of literature review. On the hand, the discussion covers the important pragmatic theories abroad, such as Speech Act theory, Cooperative Principle, Politeness theory; on the other hand, the author also discusses pragmatic strategy research in China.Chapter Three is the adaptation theory; the author explains the three factors of adaptation theory one by one, including choice making, three properties of language and four angles of investigation of adaptation theory.After the introduction of adaptation theory, the author fulfills Chapter Four with Sino-US communicative context, in which three parts are introduced, including the mental world, the social world and the physical world.Chapter Five is equally important with chapter four, introducing how Sino-US business negotiators adapt to language structure during the process of language choosing, such as sound level, lexical level and syntactic level.Chapter Six is the conclusion of the whole thesis. The author presents the limitation of this study, and then demonstrates the suggestion for future study.