A Functional Study Of The Interpersonal Grammatical Metaphors In Business Negotiation English Conversations

The studies of metaphor can be traced far back to the ancient Greece, when Aristotle interprets metaphor as a representative illustration of the classical views and as a device of poetic imagination. However, most of the previous studies have been mainly focused on the metaphorical expressions at the lexical level. As time proceeds on, more and more attention has been paid to its cognitive study. As for the researches on the lexico-grammatical level, few investigations have been carried out until recent years. M.A.K. Halliday opens up a new vista in language study and it is he who first advanced the concept of"grammatical metaphor". In Halliday's theorization, grammatical metaphor is divided into ideational grammatical metaphor and interpersonal grammatical metaphor. However, the textual grammatical metaphor claimed by some other scholars is not included in his theorization. As for the ideational grammatical metaphor, there are quite a few books and articles that have been devoted to exploring it. However, compared with ideational grammatical metaphor, fewer researches have been conducted to investigate the interpersonal grammatical metaphor.Systemic-Functional Grammar provides a multi-level, multi-functional theoretical framework for discourse analysis. Previous studies on discourse analysis mainly focus on written discourses, spoken discourses such as negotiation business conversation (more exactly speaking, it has both written and spoken characteristics) have seldom been dealt with by functionalists. Interpersonal function, as one of essential parts in Halliday's theoretical framework, plays a vital part in discourse analysis. Therefore, on the basis of previous studies, the author selects 15 negotiation conversations from quite a few of sources as the corpus and adopts Halliday's grammatical metaphor as the theoretical framework, aiming to analyze the distribution, types and functions of interpersonal grammatical metaphors. After enough elaborations on relevant theories and quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus, some major findings are found out as follows:The phenomenon of interpersonal metaphor widely exists in business negotiation discourses. Through both the quantitative and the qualitative analysis, the author finds out that the number of metaphors of modality is far more than that of metaphors of mood, and among the three, nominalization is the least seen phenomenon in business negotiation conversation.The subjective metaphor of modality helps negotiators express their views strategically. The ingenious use of objective metaphor of modality can make one's views authoritative and convincing. Furthermore, the nominalization can play the role of a shield, protecting oneself from being attacked and evading unwanted consequences. At the initial stage of negotiation, the declarative or interrogative mood would be used instead of imperative mood, which sounds more polite and sincere, thus encouraging the other party to make requests. When the negotiation goes into an impasse, flexible moods would be adopted to express one's attitudes, sometimes firmly, sometimes euphemistically, sometimes humorously, and sometimes seriously. The imperative mood beginning with"let's…"would be selected instead of its congruent declarative or interrogative mood if one wants to be firm and polite; the interrogative or declarative mood would be preferred if one wants to make requests euphemistically and politely.The functional analysis of interpersonal metaphors in business negotiation English can further illustrate that the combination of form and content can achieve different interpersonal goals—put language into polite use; highlight the firmness of one's attitude; make one's tone more emphatic or more euphemistic; shorten the social and psychological distance between both parties; make one's views sound more authoritative; disguise the subjective nature of one's arguments; invite the other party to think for him; protect oneself from being attacked. This research provides a new perspective and some insights for business English teachers, students as well as business practitioners.