发布时间 : 星期二 文章A Brief Analysis on the Principles of Pragmatics and Its Application in Business English Negotiation更新完毕开始阅读6579e8c626fff705cc170a77
江西财经大学现代经济管理学院普通本科毕业论文
that are basic to an account of language understanding. (Levinson: 1983)
Definition 3 Pragmatics is the study of the ability of language users to pair sentence with the context in which they would be appropriate. (Levinson: 1983)
Definition 4 Pragmatics can be defined as the study of how utterances have meanings in situations. (Leech: 1983)
Definition 5 Pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning as communicate by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader). (Yule: 1996)
Making an analysis on these definitions, scholars find that each is to be found inadequate and only dose more than sketch a tang of possible scopes for the field of pragmatics. It is by no means easy to provide a fully satisfactory one. And it is meaningless to judge which one is the most appropriate since each is made based on the different emphasis and diction. However, there are two essential concepts in the science of pragmatics, so much so that no definition can ignore them: meaning and context. Therefore, pragmatics can be generally definite as the study of language in use with meaning and context as the essential concepts.
The interest in pragmatics in recent years grows rapidly. According to Levinson (193:35-40), it is partly due to some historical reasons: it is a reaction to Chomsky?s treatment of language as an abstract device, or mental ability, dissociable from the uses, users and functions of language. The second reason is that as knowledge of the syntax, phonology and semantics of various languages has increased, some specific phenomena occur that can naturally be described by resource to contextual concepts instead of the traditional linguistic branches. The third important reason is the growing realization that there is a very substantial gap between current linguistic theories of language and accounts of linguistic communication. Finally people have interest in pragmatics is due to the possibility that significant functional explanation can be offered for linguistic facts.
Anyway, pragmatics gives people hope establish the effects of the uses of language on language structure. Pragmatics theories are applied to many areas. And the cooperative principle among the pragmatics principles is a main aspect in the concrete process in the business English negotiation.
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江西财经大学现代经济管理学院普通本科毕业论文
2.2 Cooperative Principles
Grice notice that in daily conversations people do not usually say things directly but tend to imply them. For example, when A and B are talking about their mutual friend C, who is now working in a bank, and A asks B how C is getting on, B might answer” Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn?t been to prison yet.” Here B certainly implied something, though he did not say it explicitly. Grice argues that we can make a distinction between what B said in this case and what he implied suggested or meant. To make the point clearer, we can have a look at a Chinese example from a film. A boy says to a girl“你不戴眼镜的时候很漂亮”，and the girl immediately responds“我戴眼镜的时候一定很丑了”. Now the boy may have reason to deny that the girl?s interpretation is what he said. But he may not be able to deny in all fairness that implication, which we touched on in the section on logical semantics, Grice coined the term implicative. And he explored the question how people manage to convey implicative, which is not explicitly expressed.
His answer is that there is some regularity in conversation. “Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction” (1975:45). In other words we seem to follow some principle like the following; “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged”. And this principle is known as the cooperative principle or CP for short.
2.3 The Quantity Principle and Business English Negotiation
The quantity principle is to say that your language should make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange) and do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
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江西财经大学现代经济管理学院普通本科毕业论文
As we know that communication is done through two approaches: verbal and nonverbal means negotiations. Some verbal strategies can be used successfully and effectively in some negotiations while others cannot be used in the same situation. As we have discussed in chapter one, there are two types of business English negotiation: win-win and win-lose negotiation. In a win-win business negotiation, in order to maintain a long-term cooperative business relationship with each other, negotiators may use some win-win strategies instead of win-lose strategies. The most commonly used strategies for a win-win outcome are the quantity principle and some other pragmatics principles.
Grice?s cooperative principles (CP) and his maxims in short are what participants have to do in or order to communicate in an efficient, rational, cooperative way: they should speak sincerely, relatively, and clearly and provide sufficient information.
However, Grice points out that its maxims are not always observed, and people do violate these maxims in conversations and people do tell lies. He notes that a participant in a talk exchange may fail to fulfill a maxim in four ways:
(1) He may quietly violate a maxim. For example, he may tell a deliberate lie.
(2) He may opt out from the operation both of the maxim and the CP to be specific; he may say or indicate that he is unwilling to cooperate in the way the maxim requires. The example Grice gives is that he may say I cannot say more; my lips are sealed when he has no obligation to let information out.
(3) He may be faced by a clash. That is to say, he may have to violate one maxim in order to fulfill another. For example, he may be unable to fulfill the first maxim of quantity (Be as informative as is required) without violating the second maxim of quantity (Have adequate evidence for what you say).
(4) He may flout a maxim. In this case, the speaker not only knows he is not observing it, but realizes everyone else in the conversation knows it too. This situation is one that characteristically gives rise to a conversational implicative. It is obvious that no implicative would arise in the first and second ways of
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江西财经大学现代经济管理学院普通本科毕业论文
violation because there is no such basis as the CP. However, the third and the fourth ways of violation do lead to implicative in conversation. An example to show the clash between the two maxims is: when two people are planning a journey in France, A asks” where does C live?” and B replies “Somewhere in the South of France.” Grice explains that “There is no reason to suppose that B is opting out; his answer is, as he well knows. Less informative than is required to meet A?s needs. This infringement of the first maxim of quantity can be explained only by the supposition that B is aware that to be more informative would be to say something that infringed the maxim of quantity (Don?t say what you lack adequate evidence), so B implicates that he does not know in which town C lives” (He Zhaoxiong, 2003:378-379). However, the fourth way of violation interests Grice most. In this case, with no intention of deceiving or misleading, a speaker blatantly fails to observe a maxim just because he wishes to prompt the hearer to look for an implicated meaning in his speech. What?s more, though some maxim is violated at the level of what is said, the hearer is entitled to assume that the overall cooperative principle is still observed at the level of what is implicated. This is the most typical way of generating a conversational implicative. For instance, the negotiators are partners who are discussing on details of their cooperation, with A representing the American side and B the Chinese side:
A: I have tried to set out these thoughts about joint ventures generally. It is clear that joint ventures are not easy. Like marriages, they are not, in the word of our Prayer Book, to be entered upon ill-advisedly or lightly.
B: Same in China, marriage is under an engagement. A: I mean business. B: I mean business too.
A: (Shrugging): Another thing must be clear any dispute of whatever nature arising out of or in any way relating to the contract or to its construction or fulfillment may be referred to arbitration?
B: Yes, of course. Any dispute of whatever nature arising out of or in any way relating to the contract or to its construction or fulfillment may be referred to
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