An Analysis Of Transitivity In Business Negotiation

Since China entered into the World Trade Organization and became a member of this institution, business negotiation has become the important implement in communicating and information exchanging in business market. Compared with the past time, more and more companies involve in the business negotiation at present.Transitivity analysis is frequently used in various discourses which includes both literary and non-literary texts. Mostly, the past studies focused on literary works. The scholar Halliday firstly carried on the transitivity approach on discourse analysis. He applied this approach to analyze William Golding's novel <>. Nowadays, business negotiation as an indispensable tool in modern society has drawn more and more linguists' attention nowadays. Hence, this thesis will concentrate on transitivity analysis of business negotiations.This thesis mainly utilizes the quantitative study to do transitivity research on business negotiation. The aim of this study is to make the data more objective and persuasive on transitivity analysis. Besides, it is likely to show the distribution and pragmatic function of each transitivity types from 51 pieces of business negotiation texts which are selected from authoritative works and internet. Meanwhile, the distributions of process types in three stages of business negotiation are studied in this thesis. The results can be seen clearly from listed table.This thesis demonstrates the fact that three main process types occupy greatly in business negotiation among six kinds of process types both in the whole business negotiation and three stages of negotiation. In the first two stages of business negotiation, relational process takes up the highest percentage. Then it goes to material process in the second position and mental process in the third rank. However, in the final stage, the most frequency is attributed to mental process among three major processes. Then the second and third rank is ascribed to material and relational processes respectively. Among the three minor processes, verbal, existential and behavioral processes are in the descending order in business negotiation. As for the main participants, altogether there are three main participants appeared in three stages of business negotiation, that is, the pronoun "we/our"-represented company, "I"-the negotiator as well as "you/your"-negotiator or represented company from the other party. The highest frequency is attributed to the participant "we/our" in the first and second stages of business negotiation whereas the largest proportion goes to the main participant "I" in the final stage. As soon as deep analysis, the pragmatic function of each process and main participants are illustrated in each following section.As soon as reading this thesis totally, English teacher, especially business English teachers should add the awareness on considering unconscious points of business negotiation. They should be led to hold the deep cognition and language choice. Moreover, it is hoped for negotiators to have the understanding for choosing the better words and structure in order to make an agreement in business negotiation.