A Study On The Interpersonal Meaning Of Epistemic Modality In Business Negotiation

Halliday claims that interpersonal meaning represents speaker’s own attitude and judgment; it expresses the role relationships seeking to influence the attitude and behavior of others. The essential feature of text, therefore, is that interaction. Abundant interpersonal meanings are contained in the business negotiation discourses, on which plenty of researches have been done. However, as for the interpersonal meanings of cognitive modality in the business negotiations, few has been involved in.Based on the theory of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, this paper applies both quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze the interpersonal meanings of epistemic modality in business negotiations. The author uses several dialogues extracted respectively from two business English books, namely, English for Business Negotiation and Business English in qualitative method. These two books were chosen after searching for the Internet and asking for professional recommendations and making sure that the books were written by the well-known and acknowledged writers, in this way the validity of this study would be assured. In addition, to guarantee accuracy and objectivity, the author also collected several dialogues from the Internet, whose contexts have involved the negotiators coming from Asia, Europe, Oceania, and America. Thus they can be representative and authoritative. Meanwhile, quantitative analysis was also utilized by taking the following steps.Firstly, selecting some business English negotiation discourses randomly;Secondly, identifying epistemic modal expressions used in such materials;Finally, analyzing the interpersonal meanings that the epistemic modal expressions conveyed.It is found that epistemic modality is widely used in business English. By choosing different forms of epistemic modality, speakers would be able to realize kinds of interpersonal functions, including showing politeness, protecting themselves, objectifying opinions, and shortening distances. As a result, the utilization of epistemic modality conforms to the features of business negotiations, and will also satisfy the needs of social cultures.