Turn-taking In Sino-US Business Negotiation: A Perspective Of Intercultural Communication

Turn is an utterance unit in spoken dialogue. Turn-taking is the key issue in conversation analysis, and the convention of turn-taking varies between cultures and languages. Harvey Sacks, Emuanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson find the most illuminating results concerning the structure of conversation. During the 1990s, researchers from a range of disciplines have tried to do research on these phenomena, with special focus on the role of syntactic, prosodic and semantic/ pragmatic factors on discourse such as meetings, classrooms, courtrooms, clinical interviews, broadcast interviews, telephone dialogues, etc. This thesis explores turn-taking in Sino-US business negotiation from the following three culture perspectives: Hofstede's culture values, Hall's high-context culture and low-context culture, and time orientation, which provided a new perspective for the researchers. It is believed that the research into this area will not only deepen our understanding of turn-taking but also broaden the research coverage of Sino-US business negotiation, and this thesis can be of theoretical and practical significance to Chinese business negotiators for appliance and reference.This thesis consists of four parts not including the introduction and the conclusion.Based on the previous study on this topic, the introduction gives the author's rationale for choosing this subject. And also introduces organization of this study, and concisely presents the significance of this thesis.The theoretical framework of this thesis is based on Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson's turn-taking theory. Chapter 1 is the theoretical framework, which enumerates some previous theoretical findings reached by scholars in the field, all of which constitute the theoretical basis of the study. It also analyzes the relationship between culture, business negotiation and turn-taking.Chapter 2 and chapter 3 are the focus of this thesis and display the originality in this study. Chapter 2 discusses turn-taking organization in Sino-US business negotiation. It especially analyzes three aspects of turn-taking application in Sino-US business negotiation from culture aspect: choice of the topic, length of the turn and controlling strategy of the turn. Chapter 3 fully explores culture influence on turn-taking in Sino-US business negotiation from Hofstede's Dimensions of Culture values, Hall's high-context and low-context communication, and time-orientation. Some examples that found from books are used to explain the influence. Chapter 4 advances three suggestions to the domestic negotiators: having a good command of the negotiation language; having a good understanding of turn-taking; strengthening cultural awareness of turn-taking.The last part is the conclusion, and it points out what deserves to be further studied.