An Analysis of Language Strategies for Sino-US Business Negotiation from the Perspective of High and Low Context Theory

Abstract

With the acceleration of economic globalization and integration, China and America, as the two largest economies in the world, have increasingly frequent communications in the economic field. Under this circumstance, negotiation becomes an essential part of international business activities and is of vital importance in international markets.

Language, as the most important tool of people’s communications, plays a decisive role in business negotiations. At present, many foreign scholars have conducted in-depth studies on negotiation theories and strategies, which lay a theoretical foundation for the research of negotiations. In China, most of the scholars have researched the business language features or pragmatic strategies in such particular fields as humor, politeness, compliment and the like.

This thesis adopts the literature review method to discuss the language strategies in Sino-US business negotiations based on high and low context theory by generalizing and analyzing the collected literature. The paper can be divided into four parts. Part one introduces high and low context theory. Part two, a brief introduction of business negotiation will be given. Part three, language strategies in business negotiation are analyzed from the aspects of vagueness, euphemism and understatement. Part four illustrates the choice of language strategies in Sino-US business negotiation. The aim of this thesis is to provide a theoretical basis for negotiators to choose appropriate language strategies, so as to make the language used in business negotiations more accurate and the negotiation process smoother, and then achieve the win-win situation.

Key Words: high and low context theory; business negotiations; language strategies