Verbal irony and other figurative tropes on Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution Blog

This paper looks into social maneuvering, positioning and personality-related needs of web users in economics blogs. Considering that domain expertise, credibility and knowledge communication skills may affect the strategies through which users control and communicate specialised knwoledge, express opinions and align themselves or disagree with discussants within a given online community, our question is one about negotiating roles and relationships across posts and comments. To this purpose, we carry out qualitative data analysis into the Marginal Revolution blog (year 2012, 2016), hosted by the economist Tyler Cowen. The focus is on verbal irony and other figurative tropes, whose sociopragmatics affects enable bloggers to adjust to the personality-related needs of their interlocutors, signal or engineer their position, and ultimatey negotiate, construct and control expert knwoledge.