The Discourse of Negotiation – A Genre-Based
The Discourse of Negotiation – A Genre-Based

Summary/Abstract: The article proposes a generic model for a type of communicative discourse: the discourse of negotiation based on the concepts and methodology of the pragma dialectic theory of argumentation. The first part defines negotiation as an argumentative type of discourse and argues in favour of a generic analysis. In what follows a short presentation of the pragma-dialectic theory is made outlining its major benefit for the genre analysis, i.e. its normative and descriptive nature. The most important concepts of this theory – the critical discussion, the concept of relevance and the role of arguments – are analysed within the framework of the discourse of negotiation. The proposed generic model comprises stages, moves, steps and speech acts which are most frequently encountered in the discourse of negotiation. The article concludes with a parallel between the critical discussion and the negotiation model proposed in which the major differences between the two are highlighted. Although the paper is largely theoretical offering few examples, it claims that the study of generic structures for different types of discourses can be extremely useful in the ESP or EAP classes. The reason is that such an analysis highlights not only the lexical and grammatical aspects, but also the overall structure, the structure of arguments, their role and relevance in a text type thus contributing to the development of communicative competence.

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