Entrepreneurs’ personal, professional and social values are key for the business to thrive. Under the background of carrying forward excellent entrepreneurship, it is of great practical signifi cance to correctly understand the value characteristics of contemporary Chinese entrepreneurs. Most existing researches on entrepreneur's values adopt self-report method, which is difficult to reveal the deep concept system. The investigation of metaphors in discourse can avoid the defense and concealment of information; meanwhile, the intertextuality analysis of the discourse of different subjects can explore the meaning and attitude shared by different subjects. This study attempts to combine metaphor and intertextuality to investigate the value system shared by entrepreneurs. Through the analysis of metaphor identifi cation, intertextuality identifi cation and intertextual metaphor interpretation, this study explores the value judgment of the discourse subject hidden by intertextual metaphor on entrepreneurial activities. This paper selects the corpus of about 270,000 words of 54 private entrepreneurs. Through the analysis of intertextual metaphor of corpus, it is found that diligence (persistence), creativity, competition, medium in power, low in wealth orientation, and low achievement, risk-taking and independence are the paramount values for Chinese entrepreneurs. The fi ndings are in contrast to the existing studies on the characteristics of Chinese entrepreneurs, such as low innovation, low competition and low power orientation, and the causes for such differences are discussed. This study demonstrates that intertextual metaphor analysis can be a useful method to explore the values of entrepreneurs, and entrepreneur discourse analysis is an effective approach to the study of entrepreneurs.
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