Dominant Speech Acts in the Communicative Situation of Business Negotiations

Abstract

The following article is devoted to the problem of speech acts within the frame-work of business negotiations and deals with the investigation of business discourse. The chief purpose of this article is to outline a range of speech acts with various illocutionary aims, which has been reached in the course of the research. The work is primarily based on the classification of speech acts, advanced by J. Searle, that encompasses representatives, directives, commissives, declarations and expressives. Later it has been expanded by A. Wierzbicka and M.A. Shelyakin, who added to the list interrogatives and vocatives respectively. In the analysis undertaken the following methods were applied: the method of discourse analysis (which gave an opportunity to highlight common for business discourse linguistic units), a continuous sampling method (which allowed to single out the speech acts, which contain performative verbs), and the method of analysis of visual material (which made it possible to value cinematography episodes as a reliable source of information on business talks). All the examples used in the article were taken from the following movies: 1) “The Big Short” (2015) directed by Adam McKay, “Wall Street” (1987) directed by Oliver Stone, and its sequel “Wall Street: Money never sleeps” (2010). As a result, it has become possible to consider illocutionary acts, which are used in the communicative situation of business negotiations, as well as illocutionary goals driving the communicants.

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