The significance of current study is to make up for the deficiency of comparative study on bargaining and negotiation in linguistics. Since Jönsson gave a clear and understandable distinction between bargaining and negotiation in his work Handbook of International Relations, it is difficult to refer to other works to find out the relationship of these two words. In addition, current study combines the discipline of political science and linguistics (especially corpus linguistics). It aims to close the gap between expression measurements and the qualitative text analysis and further to provide insightful reflections upon these two terms.
2 Literature Review
2.1 Terminology Dynamics
The so-called “term” refers to a word or phrase used to control and perpetuate specialized knowledge in an institutional context. The meanings of terms are not necessarily fixed. Their concepts may depend on situations where they are used. Conceptual development is driven by the dynamics of knowledge in a domain, which is in turn driven by the continuous interaction of people who follow the common goal in the organization. Language change is a reflection of conceptual change, which in turn stimulates further conceptual change[2]. Temmerman[3] proved that terms in molecular biology are driven by metaphoricity, a certain degree of vagueness, and the dynamics of conceptual development. However, we must be aware of the fact that terms in a field like political science cannot be described analogously to technical terms, which should be explicitly defined and standardized by institutions instead of being ambiguous and metaphorical. For scholars in the humanities and social sciences, however, there is no general agreement on the terminology of their discipline. Different schools of thought and theoretical methods shape their own terms even though they often have the same meanings. The very common terms, for example, such as “structure”, “system” or “norm”, exist between theories and academic disciplines, losing their accuracy and even tend to be used as universal words leading to the fuzziness of ideas and concepts. However, it doesn’t mean that ambiguity has always a negative influence on scientific terms. Ambiguity and metaphoricity of terms rather contribute to create knowledge and bring research forward, because they indicate that concepts are applied to new research contexts. However, understandable explicitness and transparency are indispensable when scholars deal with terms.
2.2 Previous Studies on Key Terminology in International Relations
This review focuses on previous typical studies on key terminology in IR. Western scholars began to study political discourse in the 1940s. Scholars mainly use linguistic methods to analyze political discourse in terms of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis or critical discourse analysis. Since the 1980s, the study of international politics and international relations has undergone the “linguistic turn”. Scholars have deeply realized that language, on the one hand, determines the dominant mode of thinking of both parties in political communication. On
