| With the development of globalization and integration of the world's economy, international business activities become increasingly frequent, which enables goods, services, capital or technologies to cross national boundaries to meet the requirements of different countries. International business negotiation plays a crucial role in international business activities. Successful business negotiation is essential for carrying out the business activities and therefore more business opportunities will be achieved and good business relationships will be established. Although international business negotiation has long been the focus of scholars from home and abroad, their studies are mainly confined to the analysis from the perspective of culture or pragmatics. There are few studies on the discourse of international business negotiation from the perspective of Systemic-Functional Grammar.The major function of language is communication. As Halliday illustrates, all languages are organized around two main kinds of meaning:the ideational and the interpersonal. The ideational meaning indicates that the language is used to understand the environment while the interpersonal meaning indicates language is used to communicate so as to establish and maintain relationships between each other and through communicating, the speaker expresses his or her identity, social status, judgment or attitude toward the people and things around. In the course of business negotiation, the adoption of different language structures by negotiators embodies rich interpersonal meaning, which thus becomes the research subject of the present study. In this study, the author will adopt Li Zhanzi's analytical framework to carry out the analysis of interpersonal meaning in the discourse of international business negotiation from the perspective of Systemic-Functional Grammar, namely, mood, modality, appraisal system and interpersonal metaphor. This analytical framework which consists of both micro-social hierarchy and macro-social hierarchy is an expansion of Halliday's interpersonal model. The 15 samples of international business negotiation are selected randomly from four published books on international business negotiation and will be analyzed by a combination of quantitative and qualitative research approach.It is found through the analysis that, first, mood system embodies rich interpersonal meaning, in which the declarative mood is used most frequently by negotiators to give information about the products or services and meanwhile it expresses the negotiator's position or attitude. The interrogative mood is employed by negotiators to ask for information, in which the yes/no interrogative mood is used by negotiators as a linguistic strategy to put forward the requirement in a euphemistical way in order to ease the atmosphere in the course of international business negotiation, whereas the imperative mood is least frequently used in the discourse of international business negotiation due to its commanding and authoritative tone. Second, the modality system is also a major language structure in realizing interpersonal meaning. Negotiators tend to employ low and median value modal operators or modal adjuncts to express his or her viewpoint or attitude, whereas the high value auxiliaries are seldom used due to its aggressive tone. Third, appraisal system is also an indispensable part in realizing interpersonal meaning in the discourse of international business negotiation, in which the negotiator uses different lexical and grammatical structures to express his or her attitude or judgment toward the deal being negotiated in order to ease the atmosphere or attempt to convince the other side to accept the condition offered. Last but not the least, interpersonal metaphor as the macro-social hierarchy of Li Zhanzi's analytical framework is also proved to be a major language structure in realizing interpersonal meaning in the discourse of international business negotiation, in which the negotiator mainly adopts different types of projecting clauses to give prominence to or objectify his or her viewpoint or judgment so as to persuade the other side to accept the condition offered or to make certain concession.It is hoped that this tentative study on interpersonal meaning from both the micro-social hierarchy and macro-social hierarchy would be a helpful supplement to the discourse analysis and it is the author's hope that this research will deepen people's understanding of the language features in the discourse of international business negotiation. Hopefully, findings of this research will be of some value to the teaching and learning of international business negotiation. |
