| Language users use different linguistic forms strategically to achieve different communicative intentions. Negotiators use pragmatic strategies to achieve their communicative intentions. While many scholars abroad have made a study of the strategies in business negotiation from a managerial view, which seems to be lacking in language data as evidence, most of the Chinese scholars have paid more attention to the pragmatic strategies such as strategies of politeness, humor, and euphemism applied in international business negotiations from different perspectives. Therefore, application of the pragmatic strategies can only be described as means of getting as much profit as possible under a competitive win-lose negotiation situation.In win-lose negotiations, business profit is considered as "a constant pie", the more one negotiating party wins, the more the other party will lose. If a satisfactory long term win-win relationship is supposed to exist between two parties, they should recognize that their current negotiation is merely a single event in their ongoing association and both sides win. Here in this thesis what interests us most is the studies of pragmatic strategies in business negotiation under a win-win situation.This thesis intends to follow Sperber and Wilson's proposal and to make a tentative inductive study of strategies by taking the Relevance Theory (RT) as its rationale, and to probe into the essence of pragmatic strategy and its application in international business negotiation under a win-win situation. Enlightened by RT in pragmatics and knowledge of business negotiation, this thesis attempts to adopt a qualitative approach with careful case analysis. The language data I have collected have to be limited to second-hand materials among recent publications on business negotiations.The interaction between given information and new information via the selection of pragmatic strategies is a process of establishing a cognitive context continuum which is quite different from the traditional view of context as static rather than dynamic. The cognitive assumptions, rather than the actual state of world, affect the interpretation of an utterance in a negotiation. When an item of information has a contextual effect/cognitive effect, it is relevant in the given context.One of the new findings of this thesis lies in the conclusions that given information and existing assumptions along with new information in a business negotiation form a bargaining range which can be enlarged by negotiators' inferring each other's target points and resistance points via selection of pragmatic strategies, thus to make it possible that both parties can have more chances and opportunities to reach an agreement.The enlargement of a bargaining range indicates that the newly-established cognitive context by means of interaction of given and new information has taken the place of the "current context" which now becomes the background context.Pragmatic strategies in a business negotiation can be divided into two subcategories: verbal strategies and nonverbal strategies. It is undoubtedly conceivable that nonverbal strategies play a more crucial role in business negotiations. By observing the nonverbal languages a negotiator uses, his opponent may obtain new information which, combined with the existing assumptions expressed by the use of verbal communication, may strengthen, contradict the existing assumptions in return, and help one party to make a sound judgment of the real communicative intention of the other party.As a result of the interaction of the new information with the given information and the existing assumption, means of nonverbal communication such as body language, facial expressions, paralanguage and silence can be used as strategies to convey the communicative...
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