A Pragmatic Study Of Hedges In Business Negotiation From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

With the implementation of “the Belt and Road initiative” in our country,business activities are increasingly frequent.As an important business activity,business negotiation is different from daily verbal communication,which highly requires ingenious,flexible linguistic strategies and negotiation skills.Hedges,as an important form of fuzzy language,widely appear in various kinds of verbal communication.In business negotiation,hedges is a kind of important communicative strategy.In recent decades,linguists have conducted plenty of research on hedges.According to the existing literature survey,there are relatively few pragmatic studies on hedges in business negotiations at home under the theoretical framework of the adaptation theory.What’s more,the comparative study of two corpora is a new research trend in recent years.In this study,the author built a small Business Negotiation English Corpus(BNEC)as the observed corpus,which contains 100 pieces of business negotiation dialogues.Most linguistic materials of the corpus are selected from domestic authoritative textbooks in business negotiation,and part of the materials are provided by the foreign trading companies.At the same time,the spoken section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA)is adopted by the author as the reference corpus in this study.Through quantitative research,the author performs comparative and statistical analysis on the frequency and distribution characteristics of hedges in two corpora,to explore the similarities and differences of use of each type of hedges,and then reveal the characteristics of choices in hedges under special and specific context.The author also,based on adaptation theory,provides a framework for the interpretation to the choice and use of hedges,which aims to figure out the dynamic adaptation process of hedges in multidimensional context of business negotiation.As the results of comparative analysis of statistical data show that,there are some similarities to some extent,as well as significant differences in the use of hedges in both business negotiations and spoken English.Firstly,in two corpora,adaptors are the hedges with the highest frequency in both corpora,and attribution shields display the lowest frequency equally in two corpora.However,the second most frequently used hedges in business negotiation are plausibility shields,and then are rounders.And in the Spoken section of COCA,adaptors is the second frequently used hedges and plausibility shields rank the third.At the same time,the frequency of adaptors and plausibility shields are extremely approximate in Spoken English.Through the chi-square test,the contrastive analysis of each type of hedges indicates that the use of hedges have differences,selectivity and adaptability under specific business negotiation context,which differ from those in spoken English.Hedges in businessnegotiations are the results of adaptation made by negotiators to the negotiation context,psychological world,physical world as well as social world of both parties of negotiation.And the above three contextual factors are not independent from each other,but impacting and restricting the dynamic adaptation of hedges in a mutual and joint way.And hedges in business negotiations adapt more to mental world and social world than to physical world.Through the establishment of corpus,this study brings the research method of hedges from the usual empirical research paradigm to a new stage that combining empirical research with positive research.This study hopes to provide some practical hints and inspiration for business negotiators,so as to they can have a better and deeper understanding of the specific application mechanism of hedges in business negotiations.And negotiators can make use of this effective language strategy,so as to achieve a better communicative effect and achieve the purpose of negotiation successfully.