Brazilian manufacturers and United States importers doing business: The co-construction of arguing sequences in negotiation

This study describes the discourse production and processing of arguing sequences in a naturally occurring business negotiation between Brazilian manufacturers and U.S. importers. Initial chapters discuss this data source and the microethnographic processing of it, and then review, with transcript data illustrations, the literature grounding this as an interactional sociolinguistic microanalysis of negotiation talk in interaction. Analyses in the core chapters describe negotiational arguing sequences. These sequences develop within a limited topical scope, and out of a third-position sequential environment. When parties misalign with a bargaining position, they account for that action. When the recipients do not honor that accounting practice, arguing ensues. How the accounting practice withstands opposition determines the type of closing of a sequence. Further microanalysis reveals that participants orient to negotiational arguing sequences as interactional units which often have recognizable openings and closings. Their main constitutive actions--accounts and challenges--are examined. Analyses of example occurrences of different types of arguing sequences show the range of variation of the phenomenon across the corpus. Participants in negotiation talk co-construct these sequences of concerted arguing actions primarily through conversational turns which are topically connected among themselves as well as to previous bargaining sequences. Unlike its non-negotiational equivalents, such arguing is topic-restrictive and interactionally bounded, resulting from the negotiating participants\u27 institutionally mandated joint efforts to locally establish some degree of common ground regarding issues on which the parties have displayed explicitly opposing views. This is required to allow alignment between the parties, preferably so that a bargaining reply can be proffered, and so that the parties may rely on each other as committed to particular courses of action in their post-negotiational future. Despite the participants\u27 different linguistic background and societal membership, and despite the complexity of their interactional task, no significant miscommunication was observed in their co-construction of negotiational arguing, in contrast with what has typically been found in intra-societal interethnic encounters. This study thus postulates that the interdependent institutional goal-orientation of participants engaged in inter-societal negotiation may minimize serious cross-cultural miscommunication