A Study On Text Coherence Of Business Negotiations

Business negotiations play a critical as well as decisive role in business communications. They have, however, not received much attention from linguists, especially from the perspective of discourse analysis.Coherence is one of the major features of a text. There are many factors contributing to text coherence, among which the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hassan in Cohesion in English is the most prominent one. The research questions in the thesis mainly are:what are the factors contributing to discourse coherence? Is there a complete theoretical framework for the study of discourse coherence? What are the linguistic features of oral business negotiations and written ones? How to achieve a coherent and successful business negotiation?The author holds the view that cohesion is the linguistic condition for text coherence; and that communication is a linguistic activity which takes people as its departure, therefore, the cognitive ability of the participants in the communication is also a major contributor to text coherence. Whether the participants can find relevance in a communication and make it move on smoothly is a key factor for text coherence.Based on the above statement, the author proposes a theoretical framework for the study of text coherence-at the lexical-grammatical level, structural and non-structural cohesions are discussed. At cognitive level, we use relevance theory to explore the importance of ostensive-inference process and cognitive context in achieving discourse coherence. According to the framework, discourse coherence is achieved through cohesions at the lexical grammatical level and at the cognitive level. The two elements complement each other. The study on cohesion at lexical grammatical level includes the structural and non-structural cohesion mechanisms proposed by Halliday. Structural cohesion refers to transitivity, mood and grammatical metaphor and non-structural cohesion includes reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. The analysis of cohesions at the cognitive level is based on relevance theory put forward by Sperber and Wilson, which explores the effect of ostensive-inference process and cognitive context on discourse coherence.The author adopts the case study methodology. She randomly chooses four business negotiation texts from the website and related book, of which two are oral negotiations, two are written business letters. By virtue of using the proposed theoretical framework, the present study first proves the feasibility of the framework in analyzing text coherence. Secondly, the author has found out that the oral and written forms of business negotiation bear their own specific features in structural and non-structural cohesions. Last, the analysis of coherence of the four cases based on relevance theory has revealed that in oral business negotiations, the cognitive environment of the participants is constantly changing as the conversation moves on. Consequently, oral negotiation poses a greater challenge on the ostensive-inference ability of the participants. In the final part, the author points out that there may be some communication barriers brought about by cultural differences in business negotiations. Thus, to the hearer, the discourse is incoherent. To address this problem, the author believes seeking relevance of context of situation and cognitive context will achieve discourse coherence, thus realizing the ultimate goal of business negotiation.The present thesis has some theoretical and practical meaning to the study of text coherence of English business negotiation.