A Pragmatic Study Of Non-cooperative Phenomena In Business Negotiation-from The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Cooperative principle which was put forward by Grice in1967is the fundamentalrule guiding conversational communication. According to him, both the speakers andhearers should observe Cooperative Principle. However, in the actual verbalcommunication, the violation of the CP maxims is a common phenomenon.Non-cooperation as a kind of linguistic strategies is often used in communication. Manyscholars both at home and abroad have studied it from different perspectives. Inbusiness negotiation, if both parties who have a cooperative relationship want to get amaximum interest, they have to use appropriate language. Non-cooperation as a kind ofstrategy has always been used by negotiators. So far some researches have been done inthe study of the non-cooperation in business negotiation. However, the study ofnon-cooperation in business negotiation from the perspective of linguistic adaptationtheory is seldom mentioned.Therefore, in this research, the author analyzes the business negotiation dialogues byusing a qualitative method under the basis of other scholars’ research achievement innon-cooperation. It has been found that non-cooperation as a kind of strategy hasalways been used by negotiators. While, the cooperative principle cannot give a rationalexplanation. So under the guidance of linguistic adaptation theory, the author putforward the following two questions:1) Why does the negotiator violate the maxims of CP?2) How does the violation of CP maxims by the negotiators adapt to the context inbusiness negotiation?By analysing the language data that is collected by the author, it has been found outthat the linguistic adaptation theory has strong power on the explanation of the existenceof the no-cooperation in business negotiation. We can conclude that in business negotiation, the adoption of the strategy of non-cooperation by negotiators is anadaptation to the business negotiation context, in other words, the adaptation to themental world, to the social world and the physical world in business negotiation，so thatthey can meet their communicative needs and reach a win-win result.