A Study Of Pragmatic Strategy On International Business Negotiation Within The Framework Of Adaptation Theory

International business negotiation is a cross-cultural economic activity based on language use. The success of this activity, to a great extent, depends on the application of pragmatic strategies. In the previous studies, scholars have studied the application of pragmatic strategies to international business negotiations from different perspectives, such as cooperation strategy, politeness strategy, and vagueness strategy. All of these studies enriched the literature of pragmatic strategies and provided effective guidance and help for negotiators. However, these studies, often based on some pragmatic theories of component view, tended to take certain speech acts as their research objects. Thus, the findings of these studies could not provide a comparatively comprehensive guidance and explanation for different pragmatic phenomena in the process of negotiation communication. The thesis, taking Adaptation Theory of pragmatic perspective as its theoretical basis, probes into the application of the theory as a pragmatic strategy in international business negotiations. As a pragmatic strategy, Adaptation Theory is proposed by Verschueren in his Understanding Pragmatics (2000). He argues that language use means the continuous process of language choices, in which four aspects must be considered by language users: context, structure, dynamics, and salience. That is to say, language use, the meaningful function of language, is a dynamic process operating on context-structure relationship at various levels of salience. In the process of language choosing, language users have to make adaptation to the above four aspects. Adaptation Theory provides a totally new angle and space for the research and development of pragmatic strategies.The thesis aims to prove that Adaptation Theory provides a new perspective for the study of pragmatic strategies on international business negotiations and explains the production and understanding of language use in international business negotiations in a comprehensive way and that the theory can help negotiators to improve adaptation awareness and enhance adaptation capability in the process of language choices, in which negotiators must adapt to communicative context and language structure by the way of understanding social and cultural differences between negotiation parties and grasping pragmatic features of business register in order to achieve a successful outcome.Under the guidance of Adaptation Theory, the thesis discusses the application of adaptation strategy to international business negotiations from two perspectives, namely, communicative context and structural objects of adaptability. In terms of communicative context, the thesis analyzes the extralinguistic elements in negotiations, including the mental world, the social world and the physical world of language users. Firstly, the study discusses the personality traits, the emotional elements and the belief system of communication parties concerning the mental world. The thesis points out that in the process of linguistic choices, language users must adapt to the mental worlds of interlocutors. Especially in international business negotiations, negotiators not only need to adapt to their own personality traits, emotions, and beliefs, but also need to pay more attention to the judgments of the personality traits, emotions involvement and belief patterns of the other side so that adaptable linguistic choices could be madeWith regards to the social world, the thesis focuses on discussing the connotation of cultural dimensions and social norms and their great impact on the language use of cross-cultural negotiations. In this part, the thesis firstly introduces the four cultural dimensions of Hofstede including individualism and collectivism, high power distance and low power distance, high uncertainty avoidance and low uncertainty avoidance, masculinity and femininity and Hall's low context culture and high context culture. Then, the thesis also talks about the three aspects of social linguistic norms that negotiators have to conform to, that is addressing terms, greeting terms, and compliments. As to the physical world, the study discusses the four kinds of nonverbal behaviors, which are space distance, eye contact, smiling, salience and emphasizes the role and impact of these nonverbal behaviors in cross-cultural negotiations. On the other hand, from the perspective of structural objects, the thesis discusses linguistic choices of negotiation English at various structural levels, including language, code, style, sound, word, and syntactic structure.The thesis adopts the methodology of qualitative description and conducts pragmatic analyses of a large number of corpuses in international business negotiations. The study poses two questions in the thesis. The first question: what are the reasons for pragmatic failure in international business negotiations? The second question: How is adaptation strategy applied to international business negotiations? After corpuses analysis and research, the thesis points out that In terms of communicative context, pragmatic failures are caused mainly by negotiators'lack of adaptation awareness and cross-cultural knowledge, particularly by their lack of understanding on different value orientations. As a matter of fact, it is differences between cultures that cause differences in terms of national traits, beliefs, social norms, non-verbal behaviors among negotiators from different countries. If negotiators lack adaptation awareness and are not able to fully understand these differences, pragmatic failures are bound to occur. On the other hand, from the view of structural objects, it is negotiators'lack of pragmatic knowledge on business register that causes pragmatic failures. Concretely speaking, English used in negotiations belongs to the scope of business register, which has its distinctive pragmatic features. If negotiators do not understand these features and make adaptable choices, pragmatic failures would occur. In answering the second question, the thesis points out that in order to realize effective communication, negotiators first need to fully understand the three levels of communicative contexts in the process of linguistic choices that is, the mental world, the social world and the physical world of language users, in which understanding differences between cultures and grasping cross-cultural knowledge are the key for negotiators to carry out adaptation strategy. Besides, the thesis holds that negotiation English, belonging to the scope of business register, has its distinctive pragmatic features. At the level of sound, negotiators not only need to understand the phonetic rules of stress and intonation, but more importantly, they also need to have a good understanding of different pragmatic functions and meanings brought about by their minor changes. At the lexical level, negotiation English features specialization, clarity and conciseness. Moreover, at the level of syntax, short sentences, simple sentences and compound ones are the structures which are used more frequently in negotiation English. In terms of interrogative sentences, indirect questions are more appropriate than direct ones. And as to the passive voice, in negotiations, it contains its particular pragmatic implications and functions. The thesis points out that negotiators must make linguistic choices which are adaptable to these features at various structural levels in order to achieve desired communicative effects.The thesis studies pragmatic strategy on international business negotiations from the new perspective of Adaptation Theory and explains and proves the significant guidance of this theory. The author of the thesis sincerely hopes that the study could effectively help negotiators improve their pragmatic competence and performance in international business negotiations.