| Along with the further globalization of economy, international business negotiation has become an indispensable part of trade and business. Through business negotiations links are established by goods being traded or services being provided. Successful business negotiations are essential for more business opportunities and further development. Thus negotiators are always striving to establish a good interactive relationship with one another in order to obtain profits in their business. Therefore such a face-to-face communication embodies rich interpersonal meanings.The term"interpersonal meaning"originates from the classification of language metafunctions in Systemic Functional Grammar. Interpersonal meaning is defined as the strand of meaning produced when we use language to interact with other people, to establish and maintain relations with them, to influence their behavior, to express our attitude toward what we say and other beings in the world, and to elicit changes in others (Halliday, 2000). According to Halliday, the realization of interpersonal meaning is typically fulfilled by mood, modality and key. While many other researchers demonstrate that the theoretical framework of interpersonal meaning should be supplemented. Martin states that the interpersonal meaning can be realized by evaluation theory. Based on a combined framework of Halliday's interpersonal model and Martin's evaluation theory, the present study intends to explore the lexico-grammatical resources that realize the interpersonal meanings in the target discourse from the perspective of systemic-functional grammar. The study illustrates how interpersonal meanings are realized through its special mood system, person, modality and evaluation in this sort of discourse. Besides, the stylistic features of the discourse will be discussed and analyzed.Fifteen pieces of authentic business negotiation English were randomly collected from two books and the Internet as the object of study. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are applied in the present study so as to make sure of the validity. Through the analysis, it is found that: (1)In the business negotiation, negotiators dominantly use declarative to offer information; negotiators demand much more information from the other party by using interrogatives; while the expression of power is usually realized through imperatives. (2)Complicated reference of personal pronoun reflects the dynamics of the relationship between the negotiators. The potential cooperators intensively and subtly manipulate the first person pronoun either to distance or to strengthen the relation between each other; the use of you creates a sense of intimacy and strengthens interpersonal relationship. (3)In terms of modality, negotiator makes his/her judgment on the proposition explicit and makes the proposition arguable; negotiators often use median and low value modality to show their attitude in order to avoid being too arrogant and radical. (4)There are so many words with evaluative coloring that express negotiators'attitude, feelings, judgments etc., which enhances the interaction and negotiation for the purpose of keeping good business relationship; (5)Business negotiation English is a formal and plain language, showing honest friendship, sincere politeness and considerately understanding with clear statements of negotiators'needs and preferences.It is hoped that this tentative analysis of linguistic realization of interpersonal meaning will be a helpful supplement to the research of business negotiation texts, and it is the author's sincere hope that the study will deepen the readers'understanding of business negotiation texts. Hopefully, findings in this paper may prove to be of practical value to business negotiations and business English teachers. |
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