Talking about freedom. Figurative tropes on the Marginal Revolution blog

The present paper looks into social engineering and social positioning on the Marginal Revolution blog (2012 to present), hosted by economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok at the Marginal Revolution University. The focus is on the socio-pragmatic effects (Colston 2015) for speakers of verbal irony and figurative tropes like hyperbole – which rely on contrast – metaphor and metonymy – which rely on comparison – and other, less represented tropes. As a follow-up to Cacchiani (2019), we concentrate on the discourse around the cultural keyword (Williams 2015/1976) freedom. Qualitative data analysis suggests that core to active participants make recourse to figurative tropes for a number of effects. Their goal is to control and communicate specialized knowledge, argue their opinions, align or disagree with discussants within the blogging community, and ultimately reinforce their credibility. More particularly, verbal irony and related tropes do not appear to be a feature of posts about questions that are clearly critical in economics. On the other hand, they are found in conversation starters that address smaller questions, quirks, and apparently unimportant anecdotes and events of the day, and can readily emerge in the comments, as the thread unfolds. As regards socio-pragmatic effects, when present, figurative tropes appear to serve the purposes of emotion expression and elicitation, rather than cater for the personality-related needs of the interlocutors or express downright aggression.