| The globalization that we are witnessing today has facilitated people from a wide range of first languages and cultural backgrounds to communicate with each other through the use of English as a lingua franca(ELF).To better understand the dynamics of ELF interactions,there is a need to further explore the pragmatics of ELF usage and the communicative strategies(CSs)used(Bjorkman,2014).However,up to now,there are only a few studies focusing on the CSs employed by speakers in ELF interactions concerning business domain,particularly those conducted in China.Therefore,this thesis is designed to investigate the CSs used in this kind of setting.The purpose of the work is to outline the CSs employed in ELF business interactions and further analyze the different functions of these CSs from the perspective of rapport management.The data used in this research is collected from the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English(VOICE)which is the first computer-readable corpus comprising transcripts of naturally occurring,face-to-face ELF interactions.The present study selects2 business meetings from the professional business(PB)section since it aims to examine the CSs used in ELF business interactions.Qualitative method is adopted in analyzing the data.Firstly,CSs appeared in the data are marked by studying the surrounding discourse carefully and referring to the relevant previous studies.And then they are classified based on Bjorkman's(2014)taxonomy of CSs into self-initiated CSs and other-initiated CSs,‘self' and ‘other' being a well-known categorization in conversation analysis(CA).Secondly,all CSs observed in the data are calculated in order to give a general idea of their frequency in ELF business interactions.Thirdly,factors which have a major influence on the speakers' choice of these CSs are identified.Last but not least,the functions of these CSs are further analyzed within Spencer-Oatey's(2007)rapport management framework.The investigation of the data has revealed seven different kinds of CSs in total.They are repetition,explanation,comprehension check,repair,clarification request,co-creationand sympathy.And they can be divided into two main categories,namely self-initiated CSs and other-initiated CSs.Among these strategies,repetition and repair can either be within self-initiated CSs or other-initiated CSs.Co-creation can further be divided into in-group co-creation and out-group co-creation.When it comes to the frequency of these CSs,the statistics have demonstrated the quite high frequency of some CSs and the relatively low frequency of other CSs.And it is found that the two meetings are similar to each other in terms of the CSs use within the two main categories.Factors influencing the speakers' choice of the CSs in ELF business interactions mainly include rapport orientation,participant relations(power and distance)and communicative activity.With respect to the function of these CSs,we have divided it into the support of one's own face needs and sociality rights,and the support of the other person's.According to the data,the support of self face needs and sociality rights can be further divided into the support of self quality face,identity face and association rights.And the support of the other face needs and sociality rights can be further divided into the support of other quality face,equity rights and association rights.What's more,it is found that certain CSs are used to realize certain functions in such ELF business interactions.In conclusion,this thesis is an extension of Bjorkman's(2014)work in that the settings have been moved from academic interactions to business interactions,and the adoption of Spencer-Oatey's(2007)rapport management framework to further analyze the functions of CSs.It is hoped that the findings of this thesis can give certain implications and thus contribute a little to studies on how CSs are used in similar or different types of ELF business interactions. |
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