Business English as a Lingua Franca in Chinese-Italian Business Negotiations: A corpus-assisted case-study of communication strategies

Business English as a Lingua Franca in Chinese-Italian Business Negotiations: A corpus-assisted case-study of communicative strategies. Glen Michael Alessi Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia Dipartimento di Comunicazione ed Economia This is a corpus-assisted analysis of English used as a Lingua Franca in the context of spoken business communications between Italian and Chinese interlocutors. It examines communicative strategies used during negotiations between a Modena-based import-marketing firm and their Chinese suppliers. The methodology of this case study combines qualitative close conversation analysis (Levinson 1983/7, Handford 2010), along with from corpus-assisted analysis (CADS: Stubbs 1996, Partington 2008) and ELF interactional pragmatic perspectives (Cogo, Dewey 2012). Evaluations also included observations on intercultural ELF strategies and cross-cultural L1 strategies (Hofstede, 1991, Gesteland, 2003 and Spencer-Oatey, Xing 2008). The focus of the study is to examine how Italian and Chinese interlocutors employ spoken conventions in workplace ELF to achieve cooperation and to avoid miscommunication, and it also attempts to point out communicative shortcomings and furnish recommendations to the Italian company on how future interaction might be improved. A corpus of 30 minutes of taped and transcribed negotiations, comprised of 787 turns with 19,140 tokens, were examined using Wordsmith Tools and Sketch Engine to isolate relevant conversational features which included: turn-taking, turn-giving, turn-keeping, starters, verbal fillers, uptakes, alerts, meta-comments, silent pauses, repetition, politeness strategies, hedging and tag questions. Results revealed conscious efforts, on the part of the Chinese participants, to establish politeness while maintaining distance and formality. The Italians used interactional strategies which often neglected distinctions between non-understanding and misunderstanding, and generally furnished far fewer supportive moves (back-channel, repetition, reformulation) while at the same time they regularly provided dispreferred response formats.