Pragmatic Strategies For Effective Communication And Their Cultural Causes In International Business Negotiations

The research purpose is to study pragmatic strategies and their pertinent cultural causes in international business negotiations based on the corpus analysis of face-to-face international business negotiations between people from different countries or cultures.Based on the theories of Cooperation Principle, Politeness Principle, Face Theory, and Indiract Speech Act, specific research approaches adopted in this paper are corpus-based study and case study. The present study reaches its conclusions through analyzing oral communication corpora and communication cases in the situational context - face-to-face international business negotiations.The research shows that in international business negotiations, the selection and application of various pragmatic strategies have close relation with the cultural backgrounds of international business negotiators. It is proved that if two business negotiation parties come from one same culture, they are liable to use same pragmatic strategies and understand each other very well during business negotiations. The negotiations can result in success without cultural hindrance. Otherwise, if two business negotiation parties come from different culture backgrounds, they are likely to adopt different pragmatic strategies during business negotiations. If either side doesn't understand that the employed pragmatic strategies of their conterpartners are determined by their cultures, the negotiation may fail due to that one side misunderstands the other side. The research results drawn from the present study are that the use of pragmatic strategies such as Cooperation, Politeness, Indirect speech act, Don't do the FAT, Euphemism, Vague language, and Side-Stepping plays an important role in international business negotiations. Moreover, to some extent, cultural causes determine pragmatic strategies. Different cultures are embeded in different pragmatic strategies. We should not seperate the choice of pragmatic strategies from their cultures. The knowledge of pragmatic strategies and their related cultures can lead negotiators to success.