A Pragmatic Study Of Conversational Implicature In International Business Negotiation

Misunderstanding of conversational implicature in international business negotiation (IBN) usually occurs between the parties who do not share the same language and culture, which is one source of the failure of IBN. However, research on this problem is far from sufficiency. Thus, this thesis mainly intends to study the inference of conversational implicature in IBN. This study aims to probe into the origin of misunderstanding, discover the factors affecting the inference of conversational implicature, and build the inferential model. Meanwhile, it also tries to shed light on IBN and business English teaching from theoretical and practical perspectives.The thesis makes a qualitative and quantitative analysis on conversational implicature in IBN. Data collected by three instruments is analyzed to infer qualitative results from the perspectives of Cooperative Principle (CP) and Relevance Theory (RT). SPSS is implemented for one-way ANOVA and descriptive analysis to verify the hypotheses. The results of this research show that the inference of conversational implicature in IBN has its particular features, varying from that of daily conversation:(1) In IBN, misunderstanding rests with the miscalculation of the counterpart's contextual information. Overestimation or underestimation causes the negotiators' intended meaning to be misunderstood.(2) Inference of conversational implicature in IBN is based on CP, and negotiators should adhere to CP and its four maxims. Based on the analysis of RT, inference of explicature depends on the amount of encoded information in utterance; the inference of implicature depends on the speaker's estimations of the amount of the hearer's contextual resources and of the degree of the speaker's reliance on the hearer's cognitive abilities.(3) An inferential model of conversational implicature in IBN is a continuous dynamic model of decoding and inference dependent on cross-cultural context.