The Critical Discourse Analysis Of International Business Negotiations

Business negotiation is an indispensable part in the international trade and plays a significant role in it. People must be involved in negotiations and possess negotiating skills if you want to gain profits in international trades. Many researchers have engaged in the study of business negotiations and the studies mainly focused on the negotiation itself or some microcosmic aspects, such as language characteristics, pragmatic strategies, cultural differences and translation of business negotiations. However, this thesis is trying to apply the theory of critical discourse analysis to make a macro study of business negotiations.CDA (henceforth CDA) has established itself internationally in nearly thirty years as a new approach to discourse, which aims at demystifying naturalized discourse and shows that grammatical and semantic forms have close connections with ideology and power. It is defined as an interdisciplinary approach to the study of texts, which views language as a form of social practice. The major issues the approach of CDA focuses on are relations between discourse, society, ideology and power. CDA theory is frequently used to analyze political, media discourses without any touch on business negotiations. Under the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis, this thesis attempts to explain international business negotiations, including both written and spoken business negotiations and points out how to detect the commercial goals and social backgrounds of negotiators so that negotiators can gain benefits from the negotiation. Through the study, the author thinks that as an analytical theory, CDA can not only be used to analyze political and media discourses but also can be used to analyze business negotiations.As international business negotiations are mainly conducted in English, the business negotiation data collected in this study is in English. These data are collected from the internet or books and are authentic business negotiation cases. Through the detailed explanation, this thesis gets the conclusion that business negotiation is a kind of special institutional discourse which features that negotiators are always striving to maintain good relationship and harmonious atmosphere in order to obtain profits in their business. In international business negotiations they tend to use polite expressions therefore the power and status disparity is not quite clear, even harder to be detected. Thus negotiators had better have critical language awareness in order to avoid the business pitfalls.Fairclough's model to analyze spoken discourses still remains ambiguous, non-systematic and overemphatic on content analysis. Therefore when analyzing spoken business negotiations the author will set up a three-level analytical framework, analyzing spoken business negotiations from phonological, lexical and conversational structure level respectively. This framework is conducive to the establishment of an analytical framework of spoken discourses.Finally, implications and limitations of this research as well as some tentative suggestions are mentioned for further researchers.