A Study Of Linguistic Strategies In Interactive Discourse Of Business Negotiation From The Perspective Of Rapport Management

With the proposal and advancement of the Belt and Road Initiative,China has more frequent business contacts with other countries.As an important way for companies to explore emerging markets and achieve economic goals,business negotiation plays an essential role in promoting Chinese companies to "go global".Business negotiation is a process in which two or more parties negotiate to resolve disputes and promote cooperation on the basis of their own interests.Due to the differences between the interests of all parties,appropriate communication strategies are needed to coordinate interpersonal relationships,thereby promoting the negotiation process and achieving mutual benefit.In interpersonal activities,language has two main functions:the transactional function and the interactional function.Therefore,this study aims to explore the linguistic strategies by studying real business negotiation discourse,and analyze the interpersonal functions of linguistic strategies from the perspective of rapport management.The purpose of this research is decomposed into the following three questions:(1)What linguistic strategies do negotiators employ in business negotiation?(2)How does the use of linguistic strategies enable negotiators to manage social relations and achieve ultimate goals?(3)What factors are at work when negotiators choose linguistic strategies in business negotiation?In order to answer the above questions,this study selects the real business negotiation discourse from the Business English Corpus(hereafter BEC),and adopts the qualitative method and discourse analysis method to mark and count the linguistic strategies in negotiators' interactive discourse based on the research of Spencer-Oatey and Xing,then analyzes the interpersonal functions of linguistic strategies and the factors influencing the choice of strategies from the perspective of rapport management.The research findings are as follows:(1)Negotiators dynamically employ 20 linguistic strategies within five rapport management domains.Within the illocutionary domain,complimenting,making requests,and questioning are the most commonly used speech act strategies.The study also identifies three other specific speech act strategies of persuading,offering privilege and making concessions in business negotiation.Negotiators implement speech act strategies by using different semantic components,changing the directness and indirectness of discourse,and choosing upgraders and downgraders.Linguistic strategies such as agreement and inclusion of people present in the participation domain,choice of tone in the stylistic domain,and topic change in the discourse domain are also frequently used.(2)Linguistic strategies are employed to achieve three interpersonal functions:support of self and others' face needs,including quality face and identity face;support of self and others' sociality rights,including equity right and association right;support of interactional goals.In the context of business negotiation,these interpersonal functions are closely related to both negotiator and company.The support of any function is not the result of a single linguistic strategy but a combination of different linguistic strategies.The same linguistic strategy can play different roles and achieve different functions.(3)Factors affecting negotiators' choices of linguistic strategies include rapport orientation,contextual variables,and pragmatic conventions.In the business negotiation of this study,both parties hold the rapport-enhancement orientation.The participant relations and message content contained in contextual variables,and the underlying social principles and pragmalinguistic norms contained in pragmatic conventions have a significant impact on the choice of strategies.This study testifies the feasibility of rapport management for business negotiation discourse analysis,broadens the scope of business negotiation research,and enriches the linguistic research on business negotiation.Meanwhile,this study also provides enlightening suggestions for businessmen to conduct negotiations more effectively from the aspects of linguistic strategy and interpersonal meaning.