Key Components of Communicative Situation of Business Negotiations

Abstract

The following article considers the concepts of communicative situation, business discourse and business negotiations, as well as the specificity of their functioning. The research focuses on the cinematographic representation of communicative situation per se, which is of great interest within the field of business discourse. Taking into account sustained attention of present-day linguistics to institutional discourse in general and business discourse in particular, the need for a detailed study of the functioning of professional discourse seems quite urgent. As examples of the present study scenes of business negotiations from several American films were taken. The research rests on the componential structure of the communicative situation developed by Teun A. van Dijk (2008), which includes six basic elements inherent in any communicative situation. During the study, the following methods were applied: visual material analysis (which allows of considering a scene from a movie as a qualitative source of data, mainly in terms of non-verbal communication), method of text interpretation (which allows a researcher to single out typical patterns of behavior of businessmen during negotiations), continuous sampling method (which helps to identify language units that indicate personal characteristics of interlocutors) and a method of discourse analysis (allowing to distinguish discursive characteristics of business negotiations). As a result of the research, the presence of the components of the communicative situation identified by Teun A. van Dijk in situations of business negotiations in cinematography was confirmed. The functions performed by these components were analyzed, and the answers to the following questions were given: who performs the role of interlocutors in the situation of business negotiations, what kind of relations they hold, what message topics are common for a situation of negotiations, what are the key features of the speech and nonspeech activity of business negotiations.

Keywords: communicative situation, business discourse, business communication, business negotiations, film discourse, structural analysis