Linguistic strategies of entrepreneurial firms and financial resource acquisition

"Resource acquisition from external investors is critical for the survival of entrepreneurial firms. Prior research indicated that an entrepreneurial firm's strategic use of language in public communication can enhance the firm's opportunity to obtain external funding. In this dissertation, I extend this line of research by focusing on the linguistic characteristics of an entrepreneurial firm's communication. Specifically, I focus on whether and how language vividness, a critical lexical characteristic of an entrepreneurial firm's public communication, influences the firm's financial resource acquisition performance. Using entrepreneurial firms' IPO events as the study context, I examine the association between the level of language vividness of a firm's IPO prospectuses and its IPO performance. I argue that, in general, an entrepreneurial firm will have greater IPO success if its prospectus shows high usage of concrete and imagery words--the two primary dimensions of vivid language. Furthermore, I argue that the effects of vivid language are contingent on three factors: 1) the similarity of the language strategy the firm employs relative to the industry it is operating in; 2) the hotness of the IPO market the firm belongs; and 3) the specific content domain (section) in the IPO prospectus. Examining a sample of 679 IPO firms, I find that language concreteness and language imagery are positively associated with firm's IPO outcome. In addition, the hotness of IPO market that a firm belongs moderates the relationship between the firm's level of language imagery and IPO outcome."--Page ii.