A Pragmatic Study On "Account" In Business Negotiation

People act in ways that sometimes violate social expectations or role requirement. To bridge the gap between action and expectation, people can provide an account, which is "a linguistic device employed whenever an action is subjected to valuative inquiry" and "a statement made by a social actor to explain unanticipated or untoward behavior". Account in this sense is a ubiquitous feature in business negotiations. The accounts and their responses, in large part, render the interaction recognizable as negotiation.Although account has been researched for nearly fifty years, it has been seldom studied under the context of business negotiations, let alone to make research on it based on the naturally occurring data in the language of Chinese. This thesis is a pragmatic analysis of account in Chinese civil face-to-face business negotiation. Methodologically speaking, it belongs to a qualitative study. It is both data-driven and theory-driven. Through Conversation Analysis (CA), the thesis presents how the negotiators make accounts. Based on Jef Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory, this thesis analyzes why the negotiators make accounts when negotiating. And the thesis also summarizes the pragmatic functions that accounts perform in business negotiations.Through careful observation of the data collected, it is shown that account, as a connectedness of its sequence, can be called through "blame/reproach", "question", "offer/counter-offer", "asking of price", "suggestion", "conjecture", "probing/questioning", etc. And account can also call "evaluation/assessment", "repeated question", "account", and so on. The inner-structure of the account turn itself can be different, which is presented in several ways, that is, as a single "account", or to account after refusal words, or account after approval words, or account for suggestions one has put forward.Then why both parties make accounts from different aspects during their negotiation? From the analysis of the data, it has been found out that account is...