A Study Of Pragmatic Presupposition In English Business Negotiations

In the face of the mega-trend of economic globalization and liberalization of theinternational trade, the economic cooperation and trade contacts among countries aregetting increasingly active. Business negotiation is becoming more frequent with eachpassing day. And it turns to be one of the crucial factors that decide the realization ofbilateral cooperation. With the help of language, negotiating parties exchangeinformation, clarify intentions, coordinate relationships, close feelings and reach anagreement on the premise of a win-win condition, thus accomplishing their respectivegoals. Therefore, it can be seen that negotiation language is a vital factor in theprocess of business negotiation since it acts as an intermediary bearing andtransmitting information. Former studies on business negotiation languageparticularly emphasize the usages of negotiating skills, which is more or less short ofsupports of relevant pragmatic strategies and language theories. As a naturalphenomenon of human language communication, presupposition plays an importantrole in the negotiation language. This thesis takes presupposition as its theoreticalbasis, categorically studies the classifications of pragmatic presupposition in eachstage of the business negotiation by analyzing presupposition triggers in the collectedEnglish business negotiation discourses, and discusses in details the functions ofpragmatic presupposition in the business negotiation from the perspective ofpragmatics through the combination of the textual features and language usagecharacteristics of business negotiation. This paper tries to solve the followingquestions:1. What are the classifications of pragmatic presupposition in English businessnegotiations?2. What are the functions of pragmatic presupposition in English businessnegotiations?This thesis is based on an empirical research, during which both qualitative andquantitative researches are applied to process47English negotiating discourses, andto discuss functions of pragmatic presupposition. Research suggests that six types ofpragmatic presuppositions are adopted in the process of English business negotiations.They are existential presupposition, factive presupposition, state presupposition,belief presupposition, structural presupposition and counter-factual presupposition.The use of these pragmatic presuppositions not only helps make the business negotiation language concise, concealed, euphemistic and complimented but alsourges the negotiators to express their ideas in a way that enlarges information quantityand highlights information focus in the information transfer of English businessnegotiations.