The Rapport Management Analysis Of Request-Response In Business Negotiations Based On Sequence Organization

Requesting is one of the most commonest speech acts in our daily lives,its appropriateness and responses might threaten one's face,and may even affect the achievement of the goal and the maintenance of the harmonious relationship,so it is with the activities in business contexts.Recently,there are more and more speech act related studies conducted on talk-in interactions with Conversation Analysis as the research methodology.While studies on request-response in institutional settings such as business negotiation are quite rare.Based on rapport management theory,this thesis mainly studies business negotiation from three aspects: the distribution of request expansions,the characteristics of requests,and the features of response types.Based on 4 business negotiations in VOICE corpus,the request-response expressions are firstly retrieved manually,then classified according to the sequence.After calculating the concrete number of each class,the results are analyzed with rapport management theory.The results are mainly presented from three perspectives.Firstly,in terms of expansion sequence,post-expansion is the highest in number,followed by insert expansion and pre-expansion.Secondly,as for request,direct request strategy is the most preferred request strategy,followed by conventionally indirect request strategy.Thirdly,in regard to the response types for request for action sequences,partical is the largest subcategory of response types.While the response types for request for information sequences vary with different sorts of information requested.These findings have something to do with the characteristics that during the business negotiation the participants concern more on efficiency and the realization of transactional goals rather than face.This study can help to advance the efficiency in requesting and responding,and to promote the cooperation.Besides,it can offer pedagogical implications to the teaching of business negotiation and speech acts.