| As one of the recently-established, interdisciplinary domains in linguistics, discourse analysis has moved steadily from a surface level description to an explanation of language use. Based on the study of discourse analysis theories, this thesis, taking oral business discourse as a target for analysis, is intended to describe the rules and conventions of oral business discourse, that is, to show the linguistic features and general language strategies to achieve communicative purposes on the one hand, and to discuss the contextual factors to illustrate the importance of the non-verbal elements in business communication on the other hand. This thesis is divided into four chapters.To illustrate the wide coverage of discourse analysis, the history of discourse analysis and the survey of its recent development are presented in the first chapter and we can see that discourse analysts have revealed the relationship between contextual factors and the structure of the text from different perspectives.Chapter 2 discusses Halliday's systemic-functional approach to discourse analysis. The functional approach of Halliday laid the foundation for the research of discourse analysis. His systemic linguistics emphasizes the social functions of language. Halliday relates grammar at the clause and sentence level to situational constraints, which are referred to as 'field'-purpose of communication, 'tenor'-relationships between participants, and 'mode'-channels of communication. By discussing the nature of 'tenor', 'field' and 'mode', Halliday reveals the relationship between text and context. A text could be predicted from its context. The study of a text within its context could explain "What the members of the culture, the participants in any given context of situation, actually do themselves." (Halliday & Hasan 1985)With the rapid development of pragmatics, linguistics has adopted pragmatically oriented approaches to the issue of discourse construction since discourse analysis, with 'language use' as its research focus, studies in fact the pragmatic phenomena and pragmatic rules. They focus on how communicators draw upon contextual and relational background knowledge to determine whether an utterance sequence seems connected and meaningful. Chapter 3 discusses the contribution of the Gricean pragmatics to discourse analysis.The key concept of the Gricean pragmatics is 'speaker's meaning'. According to Grice, speaker's meaning need not be code-related and can be inferred through processes which are not the ordinary encoding and decoding processes. The special kinds of processes are the processes of following 'the cooperativeprinciple'. Four kinds of maxim are included in the principle: the quality maxim, the quantity maxim, the manner maxim and the relevance maxim. Violation of the maxims may result in implicatures, and the implicatures must be explained through context. The Gricean pragmatics is important to discourse analysis because it can help to analyze the way speaker meaning is dependent upon a cognitive context of shared beliefs and assumptions.Chapter 4 deals solely with oral business discourse. By applying the theories discussed in Chapter 2 and 3, I make a careful study of oral business discourse and negotiation dialogues. In this chapter, business oral negotiation is treated in two respects. The textual factors of negotiations are explored to show the linguistic features and general language strategies on the one hand, and the contextual factors are discussed to emphasize the importance of the non-verbal elements in business communication on the other hand. In the study of business discourse, in presenting the linguistic evidence (including the rules, conventions and characteristics of business text), much stress is laid on the techniques and strategies employed by a business speaker in communication in achieving discourse purposes as well as his or her private purposes.In summary, this thesis presents a new linguistic approach to the interpretation of oral business negotiation. The analysis e...
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