Abstract:The United States has been one of the important business partners of China. With more and more investment poured into trade between China and the United States, business negotiations become increasingly frequent. Business transactions between China and America consist of cross-cultural business negotiations. Therefore, it is practical to get negotiations moving smoothly. This paper explores pragmatic failures in business negotiations from the aspects of language ability and the social pragmatic competence. At the same time, it states how to make use of the violation of the Corporative Principle to avoid pragmatic failure, and with the hope that it can help people realize the problem of pragmatic failure in business negotiations and solve it effectively.

Key words: Pragma-linguistic failure; Socio-pragmatic failure; Corporative Principle; Counter Measure

CONTENTS

Abstract

中文摘要

1.Introduction.1

2.Literature Review.2

3.Pragma-linguistic Failures in Cross-cultural Negotiation.2

3.1Pragma-linguistic Failures Due to Inappropriate Vocabularies  

3.2 Pragma-linguistic Failures Due to Misunderstanding Sentences

3.3 Pragma-linguistic Failures Due to Misinterpretation

4. Socio-pragmatic Failures in Cross-cultural Negotiation.4

5. Counter Measures Against Pragmatic Failures5

5.1 Counter Measures Against Pragma-linguistic Failures

5.2 Counter Measures Against Socio-pragmatic Failures 

5.2.1 The Cooperative Principle and its Maxims

5.2.2 Counter Measures based on the Violation of the Cooperative Principle 

6.Conclusion .8

Bibliography10

Acknowledgements11