The Study Of Relevance-Adaptation Model Through Conversational Analysis Of International Business Negotiations

As one branch of general linguistics, pragmatics has become a hot issue among philosophers and linguists. Generally speaking, it studies the use of language in human communication as determined by the conditions of society. This thesis is a study of the newly proposed Adaptation-Relevance Model, which is probably so far the most convincing and comprehensive communicative model with a view of expounding both language production and interpretation in language use. The conversational analysis of international business negotiations in this paper, therefore, serves to validate the rationality of this model partly because: after entry into WTO, the proportion of foreign trade in China's economy is becoming larger. In various business activities, business negotiation always plays a paramount role. Since negotiation is a competition of language use to some extent, just a good command of negotiating principles, business procedure and laws concerned are far from enough. In order to take the competitive edge, international business negotiators also have to know what the implied intentions in counterparts' utterances are, and how to actively apply appropriate linguistic strategies to help them win the negotiation and get the maximized profit. This thesis is thus anticipated to help people fully understand the practical value of Adaptation-Relevance Model through analyzing concrete language examples in international business negotiations, and to bring business negotiators new enlightenment as a reward.