A Contrastive Study On Compliment And Compliment Response In Chinese-American Business Negotiation

With the rapid development of economic globalization and the prosperity of international business trade, business negotiations are on the dramatic increase. Among the most important traits needed to negotiate successfully are compliment skills. There are many tactics that can be used in the negotiations, shortening distance between counter parties and creating harmonious atmosphere.In the previous studies, Sino-Sino or US-US business negotiations were often used by researchers, in order to find the differences between Chinese compliments and English ones. However, the collected cases in this thesis are Sino-US business negotiation records, using English as communication language. The author holds that Sino-US business negotiation will be the best context for analyzing the difference of using compliment in English between the two cultures.The author collects 10 cases and divides each one into three phases. In every phase, compliments and responses have been classified and analyzed in lexical and grammatical way according to the relevant theories. Finally, the author identifies similarities and differences in terms of the compliments and responses using Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle. Hopefully, by making compliments more properly, effectively and consciously, Chinese negotiators' communicating skills will be further improved; their negotiating abilities will be further strengthened; desirable results can be achieved from the negotiations.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.