Linguistic Realization Of Politeness Strategies In English Business Negotiation

Business negotiation is essentially a kind of economic activity through language. Whether it succeeds or not depends on the use of language. In business negotiation, both parties have to cooperate with each other as well as being competitive against each other. Either party will endeavor to win the most benefits while maintaining cooperation with each other. However, discrepancies and conflicts are inevitable in business negotiation due to the competitive economic interest of both parties. So it seems crucial for negotiators to find the way of balancing competition and cooperation in business negotiation. Undoubtedly, this goal has to be achieved through the appropriate language, especially the polite language.Numerous books have been published to offer guidelines for business negotiation, but they rarely give attention to linguistic strategies in business negotiation. So this dissertation aims to analyze linguistic realization of politeness in business negotiation with regard to lexicon, tense, voice, mood, and syntax. Grice's Cooperative Principle, Leech's Politeness Principle and B&L's Face Theory serve as underlying principles in our analysis and the description of the case study. Based on these theories, a careful case analysis of linguistic strategies of politeness in business negotiation is made.It is hoped that this research will provide some guidelines for business negotiators to settle disputes and conflicts in business negotiation, assist them in creating a cooperative relationship with each other through employing proper linguistic strategies of politeness theory and finally improve the efficiency of business negotiation and realize the long term win-win negotiation.