A Study Of Compliments In Business Negotiation

Business negotiation is a complicated business activity in which parties attempt to reach an accord that specifies how they will act toward one another. In order to maximize his interests and satisfy the other part, negotiator usually employs the accommodating language.Communication accommodation theory (CAT), known earlier as speech accommodation theory (SAT), has developed a long way since its inception. The first publication on SAT emerged in 1973. In its earliest years, SAT focused on the social cognitive processes mediating individuals' perceptions of the environment and their speech styles. CAT states that language users consciously and unconsciously adapt their language to meet the need of a situation. And then convergence and divergence are two key strategies.I have attended some business negotiations. I find that accommodating language, especially the compliment, usually helps negotiator to converge with the other party, set up a congenial atmosphere, etc. How they are used and to what effect they are used appear to me to be interesting and rewarding topics of research.In this thesis, I divide each business negotiation case into three phases: initiation, problem-solving and resolution phase. In every phase, compliments and responses have been classified and analyzed in the lexical and grammatical way according to the relevant theories. Finally, I compare the cases in Chinese and English, and identify similarities or differences in terms of the compliments and responses in business negotiations.From the research, it is found that compliment has appeared at every phase of business negotiation, and negotiators prefer to employ the compliments in the problem-solving phase. All the compliments in the business negotiations reflect the Politeness Principle. Explicit compliments outnumber implicit compliments. Negotiator usually intends to achieve the multiple goals, such as face-related goals and commodity goals. When negotiators make compliments, they would like to employ some commendatory nouns, adjectives and verbs. "好" is the most typical adjective for the Chinese while the adjectives are more diverse for the English, such as "great, satisfied".In Chinese data, negotiator likes to employ pattern "Subject + Copula + Subject Complement" to make the compliment. In English data, pattern "Subject + Predicate+Object" has frequently employed.From the Theme perspective, Subject Theme is mainly employed. In Chinese data, Theme indicates the compliment addressee, such as "你/你们/您". In English data, Theme indicates the compliment addresser, such as "we".As for the Rheme, the negotiators of higher social ranks tend to compliment the institution the other party represents or s third party, rarely the other party himself. However, negotiators at the lower ladder compliment on the traits of the other party.Compliment and response form an adjacency pair. The turns, in the Chinese negotiations in particular, are lengthy. And the compliments are mingled with other utterances in a turn. Therefore, No Acknowledgement response, a dispreferred response, is the most common type in the Chinese negotiation. This type of response disobeys the Quantity and Relation maxims of Cooperative Principle. On the contrary, Comment Acceptance and Appreciation Token seem to be the preferred response for the Chinese negotiators. For the English, Praise Upgrade seems to be the case. They generally obey the Cooperative Principle.To put all this together, it is found that the business negotiation is a complicated process. Negotiators have to consider a range of factors. In terms of compliment making, they usually have certain goals to achieve. They have to choose from the pool of syntactic structures, accurately and on the spot, to be textualise the notions behind the compliment. Meanwhile, a further concern is the role and status of each in the negotiation.Further research should be dealt with more data, both the audio data and the visual data. And a study at the phonetic level would be equally rewarding.