Abstract

Business negotiation is becoming increasingly popular in international business activities. Meanwhile, language use in business negotiations is attracting great interest from scholars. Interpersonal metaphor, as a part of the main contents of grammatical metaphor, is widely employed in our daily communications and on other occasions. This paper analyses the text of dialogues collected from Internet and several well-known magazines from the two aspects, mood and modality. Mood is analyzed from context and participants’ responses and modality is studied from clause and nominalization. The summary is that interpersonal metaphor is very vital to maintain interpersonal relationship and build business relations. And this study can be of help to both the teachers and students, especially those who may be engaged in business one day, to understand interpersonal metaphor in studying English business negotiation.

Keywords: business negotiation; interpersonal metaphor; mood; modality

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1. Introduction-1

2. Literature Review-2

2.1 The definition and history of grammatical metaphor-2

2.2 Previous studies on interpersonal metaphor in discourses-3

2.3 Previous studies on business negotiation-3

3. Metaphor of Mood-4

3.1 Realizations of metaphor of mood according to context in situation-6

3.2 Realizations of metaphor of mood according to participants’ response-7

4. Metaphor of Modality-8

4.1 Realizations of metaphor of modality according to clause-9

4.2 Realizations of grammatical metaphors according to nominalization-10

5. Conclusion-11

Works Cited-12