Abstract

Negotiation is the core of buying and selling activities and an appropriate expression of discourse acts as an effective tool in successful negotiation. Thus, the study on negotiation discourse is of importance in the practice of negotiation. Nowadays scholars’ discourse analyses focus on the institutional discourses such as the discourse in court, hospital and classroom. However, this paper follows the basic findings of conversation analysis including local structure such as turn-taking, adjacent pairs and its overall structure to conduct the structural analysis of negotiation and exploit the interaction of negotiation. The method of case study is adopted and the data is scripted from two movies, Boiler Room and the Word Street to figure out whether negotiation discourse is structured. This research finds out that negotiation discourse has the stable structure as usual conversation. Besides, the interaction is dynamic and negotiators can utilize effective strategies to gain interests and realize their specific goals. In negotiation, parties should focus on interests, touch others by emotions and keep their discourses appropriate to identities so that they can achieve satisfactory results.

KEYWORDS:negotiation discourse; structure features; the process of interaction; negotiation strategies

摘　要

谈判是买卖活动中的核心组成部分，合理的话语表达是谈判成功的有力工具 。因此谈判话语的研究对谈判活动有实践指导意义。本文运用会话分析的关于话语局部结构如话轮和相邻对以及话语的宏观结构的理论对谈判话语结构进行分析，并且探索蕴含在会话结构下的谈判者的互动过程。同时以《开水房》和《华尔街》这两部电影的对话为语料进行了案例分析。本文通过研究发现谈判话语具有和一般的会话一样具有稳定的结构特征，谈判是一个动态的互动过程，谈判者可以运用有效地策略实现其特定的利益目的。谈判者在谈判过程中必须以利益为中心，以情动人，使用适合谈判者身份的谈判话语以取得满意的谈判效果。

关键词:谈判话语；结构特征；互动过程；谈判策略

1    Introduction
    Discourse analysis is to analyze the language in actual situation, to describe the process of how the users of language generate and interpret discourses and to dig out the tacit knowledge. (Zhang Zuochen, 2005）Conversation analysis is an important branch of discourse analysis. Just like discourse analysis, the target of it is the language in actual situation but it specifically refers to spoken discourse. Negotiation is a dynamic mechanism and a setting of applying language, which also needs a detailed description of the process. Therefore, conversation analysis is an effective method to understand negotiation.
 Negotiation is carried out by two parties with common interests and conflicting interests. The discourse interaction is exactly based on such kind of checks and balance. The meaning of discourse is altering with the parties’ interaction. Negotiators are capable of taking the initiative to change the existing relationship between them. The structure of interaction is an objective embodiment of this mechanism. By analyzing the structure, a deeper comprehension of the nature of such activities can be obtained.