| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 英語學系 === 105 === Communicating effectively with others has been a great skill that people want to master in order to perform well and survive in the business world. Nonliteral language use is a communicative method to reach easy and fast mutual understanding. Also, studies on gender differences in nonliteral language use are receiving contributions from different disciplines and slowly gaining more and more scholars’ attention. However, to date, studies on gender differences in nonliteral language use for achieving discourse goals in business transactions have not received much attention yet. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to investigate the preferred use among types of nonliteral language by professional males and females during the process of achieving discourse goals and maintaining successful communication in the business world. Results of this empirical study showed that males used more hyperbole, irony, metaphors, and understatement of nonliteral expressions to convey emotions and to achieve particular goals, and females used more indirect requests and rhetorical question to show polite, supportive, cooperative, affective orientation, and expressiveness to keep relationship and connection with people. The results of the present study showed that the styles of nonliteral language used by professionals in business were consistent with findings in previous research from other disciplines – such as psychology, linguistics, feminism, and pragmatics, even though the findings in the present study on hyperbole of nonliteral language showed an inverse pattern compared with the findings in the previous research. The results also suggested that professional males and females could adopt the types of nonliteral language to achieve discourse goals, which could be regarded as strategies used during successful communication in negotiation with counterparts for solving warranty claims of product lines or for undertaking price adjustments in the business world.
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