Communications in Humanities Research ISSN: 2753-7072
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Research Article

A Cross-Cultural Study of Metaphor Use in Risk Factor Disclosures: Comparing Chinese and American Photovoltaic Companies’ IPO Prospectuses

Yuan LiuSchool of International Studies, University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, China*

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract

This study combines Conceptual Metaphor Theory from cognitive linguistics, Grammatical Metaphor Theory from functional linguistics, and High-Low Context Theory from cross-cultural communication to conduct a comparative analysis of the metaphors used in the risk disclosure sections of IPO prospectuses of Chinese and American photovoltaic enterprises listed in the United States. It focuses on exploring the potential cross-cultural understanding barriers that Chinese enterprises’ metaphor usage may pose to low-context investors. To this end, this study collected risk disclosure content from the prospectuses of six representative photovoltaic enterprises listed in the United States (three Chinese and three American) and established a corpus based on this data. In light of the characteristics of photovoltaic enterprises, this study specifically examines three types of risks: market, subsidies and policies, and costs and technology. From the perspectives of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Grammatical Metaphor Theory, it identifies the use of metaphors in relevant risk statements and analyzes the difficulty of cross-cultural understanding based on High-Low Context Theory. Finally, this study proposes a method for calculating the degree of difficulty in cross-cultural understanding of the text and conducts a quantitative comparative analysis of the overall difficulty of cross-cultural understanding of different metaphor types and different risk types in the corpus. Through quantitative comparison and analysis, it is found that among different metaphor types, the passive voice poses the greatest difficulty in cross-cultural understanding; and within the content of risk disclosure, subsidies and policy risks have the highest overall difficulty in cross-cultural understanding, which requires special attention.

Keywords: photovoltaic enterprises; prospectus; risk disclosure; metaphor; cross-cultural communication
Published: June 20, 2025
DOI: 10.54254/2753-7064/2025.24165
Volume: CHR Vol.69
pp. 148-153
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