No description available.

This study develops and proposes a research approach founded on linking two novel theoretical frameworks for analysing and explaining relational strategies at intercultural workplace meetings, namely, the Multi-Level Model (MLM) and Cultural Self Perception (CSP). The approach is tested through a case study of a problematic meeting in an intercultural workplace in China. At this meeting, the Chinese and western expatriate participants both carefully adopted a range of relational strategies for problem talk. However, the interactions still evolved into a severe confrontation between the Chinese and expatriate participants. The cultural differences in relational strategies are explored on three levels, namely, tum-taking, speech act and situational context. The analysis indicates that while the relational strategies of the expatriate speakers can only be found on the speech act level, those of the Chinese speakers can be found on all of the three levels. Even on the speech act level, there are significant differences between the Chinese and expatriate speakers. It is argued that the communicative breakdown was caused by clashes of expectations of relational strategies for problem talk at meetings, and such differences can be explained by drawing on the framework of CSP. The investigation in this case study thus demonstrates that the combination of the frameworks of MLM and CSP can facilitate both systematic analysis of interactive strategies at different levels and in-depth understanding of the cultural roots for the choices of relational strategies at intercultural workplace meetings.

The present study analyses a corpus of audio recordings of authentic business meetings. The recordings were made in a variety of companies in the UK, and also in Eire, Germany and Japan. The companies which provided the data vary considerably in terms of area of business and size. The meetings themselves differ in terms of number of speakers, the relationships of the speakers, and the purposes and topics discussed; throughout the thesis the influence of these factors on communication is discussed. Previous studies of the language used in business meetings have focussed on either specific aspects of one type of meeting, such as strategies in sales negotiations, or have attempted to describe the attributes of `the business meeting' based on arguably unrepresentative data. For example, frameworks purporting to describe the genre of the meeting have been based solely on internal, or intra-organisational, data. This study is unique in that it analyses and compares a wide range of both internal and external meetings. The main purpose of the thesis is to explore the corpus in order to construct a generic model which accounts for the recurrence and dynamism within the data. This involves quantitative and qualitative analysis at the level of lexicogrammatical choice, including pronouns, deontic-modal expressions, certain key words such as problem, issue and if, metaphors and idioms, and vague language. Various `higher level' factors are also explored, such as speaker goals, strategies, conflict, convergence, `face', turn-taking, and overall structure. Through applying different approaches, such as corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and genre analysis, to the same data, a more fine-grained understanding of the data is achieved, and the assumption that business meetings are demonstrably different from and yet related to everyday spoken English is explored. The results indicate that business meetings can be categorised as a distinct genre with recurrent aspects which speakers and listeners orient towards, recognisable to both participants and observers. The study also highlights consistent differences between internal and external meetings. There is also evidence for a probabilistic relationship between the genre and the language used therein.