The Grand Strategy Of Politeness In International Business Negotiation

Numerous works have been published on the politeness language strategy of business negotiation, but the theoretical framework they have adopted is either Geoffrey Leech's Politeness Principle or Brown and Levinson's Face Theory. These theories have been questioned or criticized by some researchers in the last two decades. Based on this, Leech adjusted his Politeness Principle, further developed the research and proposed the theory of Grand Strategy of Politeness (GSP). This dissertation adopts the GSP as theoretical framework and studies the linguistic strategies of politeness in business negotiations from a new angle. It consists of six parts as follows:Chapter one is devoted to a general description, including the research purpose, theoretical significance, sources of language data, research method and organization of the dissertation.Chapter two is background introduction, which explains the definition, factors and phases of business negotiation.Chapter three is literature review. Theoretical development and related works in the field since the early 1990s are reviewed and organized systematically.Chapter Four is devoted to the discussion of language strategies in observing the 10 pragmatic constraints in GSP, thus revealing how negotiator balances business interest and linguistic politeness.Finally comes the conclusion of the dissertation. In this part, the main content of the study is summarized, and the main findings are pointed out, including the discovery that the 10 pragmatic constraints are not treated evenly in business negotiations: neg-politeness tends to outweigh pos-politeness. Then the theoretical and practical significance of the study is presented, followed by the suggestions for further research in this field.