Analysis Of Intercultural Business Negotiation From The Perspective Of Adaptation In Context

With the increase of international trade and the deepening of economic globalization, business activities among people from different cultural backgrounds increase frequently. Intercultural business negotiations have aroused more attention to concern. Business negotiation refers to the commercial activity conducted between two economic & trade cooperation parties for achievement of certain deals or settlement of certain disputes. Effective and successful business negotiations are beneficial to further development and more business opportunities.Scholars have done fruitful researches on intercultural business negotiation from the perspective of culture influence and negotiation strategies. Distinct from the previous studies, this thesis, with Verschueren's Adaptation Theory as its theoretical framework, makes research into the root cause of whether business negotiation can succeed. Jef Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, offers a new perspective for our study of linguistic phenomenon in business negotiation. According to Verschueren, language use can be taken as a continuous process of making linguistic choices by adapting to the communicative needs. Intercultural business negotiation, as a communication activity, will achieve the negotiator's purpose successfully through the language of negotiator, which is probably so far the most convincing and comprehensive to analyze the language use in intercultural business negotiation.In intercultural business negotiations, negotiator's various cultural differences, such as different religions, different values, different thinking pattern, etc., are very easy to cause linguistic and cultural transfers when the negotiator chooses and uses language, which causes negotiation fail. It points out that the root cause of negotiation failure is that in the course of negotiation either part of the negotiators fails to adapt language to the communicative context, which is composed of language users, physical world, social world and mental world. In intercultural business negotiation, when negotiators make a linguistic choice, they have to take all the four ingredients of communicative context into account so as to come to a successful negotiation. Whether negotiators make adaptation towards these factors of communicative context determines whether a negotiation is successful, and enhances negotiators'awareness of culture differences.The introduction to the thesis introduces the purpose and significance as well as structure of this thesis. Secondly, a brief introduction to intercultural business negotiation and culture influence are presented. Thirdly, a general description of the Adaptation Theory is introduced. Chapter Four is the main part of the thesis. In this part, the research on intercultural business negotiation in terms of the communicative context analyzes whether a business negotiation can succeed lies in the adaptation to language users, mental world, social world and physical world. Negotiators must take these four aspects into account to promote the smooth progress of the negotiations. Finally, the last part draws some conclusion and proposes effective strategies for further negotiation.Business negotiation, as a very crucial part of business activities, is affected by many factors. This thesis studies and analyzes the language use in intercultural business negotiation from the perspective of the Adaptation Theory of Verschueren. We have got four tentative conclusions:1. In intercultural business negotiations, the language of the negotiators should adapt to the other side negotiators such as gender, age, level of education and professional knowledge.2. Both sides of the negotiators should make proper adaptation to each other's mental world, including personality traits, emotion, desire, belief, value and thought pattern.3. The negotiator has to adapt to aspects of the social world and achieve appropriate choice-making.4. Physical world contains temporal deixis and spatial deixis that is also an important factor to determine whether an intercultural business negotiation is successful.In sum, the appropriate use of Adaptation Theory in intercultural business negotiation will effectively avoid pragmatic failure, and enhance intercultural communication awareness and competence so as to achieve successful negotiation. The guidance of Pragmatics results to intercultural business negotiations is bound to inject new vitality and helpful for further study.