Analysis Of Nonverbal Communication In International Business: A Pragmatic Context Perspective

With the rapid development of economy, science and technology, businessglobalization has become the tendency of the world. People from different culturalbackgrounds get more and more involved in international business. Internationalbusiness communication includes verbal communication and nonverbal communication.In international business activities, nonverbal behaviors, just as verbal behaviors, alsoplay an indispensable role in achieving successful communication.Nonverbal behaviors, as a communicative tool, have different meanings in differentcontexts.The study attempts to answer the following two questions:Adopting the pragmatic methods, the author explores the nonverbal behaviors fromthe new perspective of pragmatic context by analyzing the authentic examples ininternational business activities. Relevant researches of nonverbal communication andthe development of context theories are also summarized in this dissertation. The corepragmatic context and cognitive pragmatic context, which are the two elements ofpragmatic context theory, are employed to analyze the four categories of nonverbalcommunication in international business activities.The following findings are concluded from the exploration and analysis of the aboveproblems.(1) The core pragmatic context and the cognitive pragmatic context can be used toexplain the nonverbal behaviors in international business activities reasonably andeffectively.(2) Although kinesics, paralanguage, objective language and environment languagecarry ambiguous messages, they can carry and send more precise signals if conductedwith the theory of pragmatic context.(3) The six elements in core pragmatic context, including time, place, topic,condition, participants and purpose and the background knowledge in cognitivepragmatic context can be utilized to infer the hidden information conveyed by nonverbalbehaviors in international business activities. In a certain pragmatic context, participantsshould adopt corresponding nonverbal behaviors in order to achieve the expectedcommunicative goals.(4) Pragmatic context can be applied to explain the examples of nonverbalbehaviors in international business activities. Successful communication can beaccomplished through the analysis of the hidden information conveyed by nonverbal behavior in international business activities.