Study On Sociopragmatic Failures In Sino-US Business Negotiation From The Perspective Of Cross-cultural Pragmatics

Since the 18 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,China's economic and social development has made new achievements.The proportion of major economic index in the world has been increasing.The rankings of major economic and social per capita indicators have been continuously advanced,the international status has been significantly improved,and international competitiveness has been significantly enhanced.With the strengthened economic power and raise level of opening up of China,international business trade is increasing,and business negotiation plays a very important role as a key step in business trade.The United States is the largest trading country,and China and the United States have frequent economic exchanges.However,people of different cultural backgrounds differ greatly in communication methods,thinking patterns,cultural traditions,and language habits.This has led to many obstacles and even failures in cross-cultural communication between Chinese and foreign business cooperation.Therefore,cultural factors play a key role in the communication of cross-cultural business negotiations.The study of intercultural pragmatics focuses on the pragmatic phenomena and their rules in the process of communication between people from different cultural backgrounds,especially the linguistic features of speech acts.The pragmatic failure that Jenny Thomas first proposed in 1983 summarized the important factors that hindered the smooth progress of communication.Pragmatic failure is divided into pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure.Most negotiators have a good understanding of target language including syntactic structures and rules.However,due to factors of culture and native language,it often hinders the process of negotiation.Therefore,the scope of sociopragmatic failures are more worthwhile to notice.This paper takes the theory of intercultural pragmatics as the guide and takes the cultural dimension model proposed by Hofstede as the starting point to explore the social pragmatics of Sino-US business negotiation.Emphasis is placed on the discourse coping strategies based on Chinese pragmatics that are in harmony with English pragmatics.The author believes that in the process of cross-cultural business negotiations,most negotiators are proficient in the target language,but sentences that are syntactically correct does not mean that it applies to all specific contexts.Therefore,this paper explores Sino-US business negotiations from the perspective of cross-cultural pragmatics.The author analyzes factors affecting the negotiating variables,factors affecting the style of negotiation,and the causes of sociopragmatic failures,and offers some suggestions for foreign negotiators.This thesis which mainly introduces the research situation of cross-cultural pragmatics,pragmatic failures and cross-cultural business negotiations at home and abroad.And it reviews three important theories in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics: Austin's speech act theory,Brown and Levinson's face theory and Leech's politeness principle;then it introduces high-context and low-context culture in intercultural communication,Hofstede's theory of cultural dimensions.Through four cases analyzed,the variables of pragmatic failure are summarized and integrated analysis is carried out.At the same time,it analyzes the reasons for the emergence of sociopragmatic failures in Sino-US business negotiations under the framework of cross-cultural pragmatics theory.By analyzing the pragmatic failure cases in Sino-US business negotiations,the authors found that cross-cultural pragmatics can clearly explain the causes of sociopragmatic failures,and there are four scope of sociopragmatic failure affecting Sino-US business negotiations: politeness,euphemism,negotiation process,negotiation style.There are two causes that lead to sociopragmatic failure: cultural pattern,thinking pattern.Through the comparison of Chinese and American cultures,four cultural factors that influence the negotiation process,collectivism and individualism,linear thinking and non-linear thinking,power distance and uncertainty avoidance.In view of the causes of cross-cultural pragmatic failures,this paper proposes five suggestions for reducing or avoiding sociopragmatic failures.