Analysis Of Turn-taking In Business Negotiation

A turn is usually taken as the basic unit of daily conversation. And the study onturn-taking is regarded as one of key issues of conversation analysis, for the length of eachturn and the frequency of turn-taking are often used by different speakers as means ofturn-taking so as to achieve different goals of their own. Such scholars and experts as Sacksand Yuee Li analyzed the principles and rules adopted in a large amount of dailyconversations, and discussed and researched on the turn-taking theory from manyperspectives, and studied further on telephone conversation, news interview, classroomEnglish and etc. in particular. Since there have been only a few researches on real-worldbusiness negotiation abroad and at home so far, this thesis tries, for the first time, to analyzethe collected and transcribed data of real-world business negotiation by means of the length ofturns, the frequency of turn-taking and turn-taking strategy in order to discuss how eachbusiness negotiation participant uses turn-taking strategy appropriately to take the initiative inbusiness negotiation.This thesis adopts such theoretical principles as turn-construction, turn-allocation andturn-taking, that is, adjacency pair and insertion sequence and side sequence, to analyze anddiscuss the following two research questions:1. How often do negotiators use turn-taking tohold the process of business negotiation?2. What turn length will help turn controller to takethe initiative in business negotiation? The data collected for this study consisted of threeChinese business negotiations, which lasted for one hour six minutes and three seconds. Allthe collected data were transcribed into word files according to the transcription requirementof social linguistic studies, which provided reliable data for further research.The findings of this study can be summarized as follows: first of all, the turn-frequencyin business negotiations amounted to1.67turns for every minute in general, which wouldindicate or promote the smooth running of the negotiation process and help seize the initiativein the negotiation, although the turn-frequency itself could not directly determine the result ofbusiness negotiation. Second, the turn-length in a business negotiation was generallycontrolled within66.04characters in each turn on average, and the control of turn-lengthrevealed the means of turn-taking adopted by negotiation participants to push the negotiationforward and gradually take the initiative so as to be in the serve of attaining the negotiationpurpose. Besides, the appropriate use of getting-turn and turn-taking strategies, such as thecontrol of turn-frequency and turn-length, could help seize the initiative in negotiation orcarry on the process of negotiation smoothly and help negotiators reach their goals in afavorable way to some degree. Since most real-world business negotiations are kept secret, there is a great difficulty tocollect the data for research, which limits the findings of this thesis to Chinese businessnegotiation scope. And this thesis provided negotiation participants with the following twosuggestions: firstly, the turn-frequency and turn-length need to be paid more attention to inbusiness negotiation, and it is necessary to get more information and knowledge of theconcerned products. Secondly, the awareness of turn-taking in business negotiation will helphold the process of negotiation to some degree, and carry it on in a favorable direction. Thisthesis reveals the easily neglected techniques used in business negotiation in details, whichwill be helpful to the negotiators in their future business practice and also become referentialto the future study of business negotiations...