The present paper attempts to account for the rhetorical traits of two prestigious economists, who are also authors of economic op-eds: Paul Krugman and Luis Garicano, who write for a prestigious American newspaper, the New York Times, and for the renowned Spanish newspaper, El País, respectively. Through a contrastive study of a roughly 12-thousand-word corpus of either author, this analysis has attempted, on the one hand, to endeavor a qualitative analysis scrutinizing the formal, or lexical-semantic aspects, of their prose in terms of technical words, clichés and coinages, as well as the patterns of conceptualization of the metaphors they use to describe the economic crisis that is sweeping the Western world at large. The second part of the analysis has concentrated upon the interpersonality of the texts, at the pragmatic layer of the op-ed genre, thus covering the extra-linguistic context of the texts which have been scrutinized under the umbrella of metadiscourse. These two different, but complementary, levels of analysis have led to the conclusion that the authors' styles depict two individual ways in which op-eds are written in the economic world, but that their styles also refl ect cultural and linguistic differences in the way columns are viewed in the English and Spanish languages.
Keywordscolumn rhetoric, op-ed, column writing, economic metaphor, economic terminology, metadiscourse.
Introduction. The scope and purposes of the studyThe economic crisis that has been convulsing the Western world since 2008 has greatly aroused the interest of the public, bringing economic and fi nancial news to the front pages of newspapers. The banking collapse, followed by the drastic measures exerted to stop it, has destroyed some of the supposed 'certainties' of economic theory and policy (Koppl 2014). In return, the search for the truth has triggered a massive barrage of news-items and editorials that try to give the public an account of the reasons for the disaster, distributing the blame among the different fi nancial players and governments. This journalistic exercise of analysis and diagnosis is not only being accomplished by mainstream economists and specialized reporters, but has also brought to the fore the works of scientists of worldwide prestige in the fi eld of economics, more traditionally associated with academic publications and research. In the US, this is the case with Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winner and Princeton Professor (among many other titles and honours), writing for the New York Times. In Spain, Luis Garicano, a Full Professor at the London School of Economics, writes for El País, the largest newspaper in the country. The present paper uses a contrastive corpus of texts by either author, who writes in their native English and Spanish languages respectively, both making ideologically-driven diagnoses on the economic disaster. The paper is specifi cally directed towards the analysis of their different rhetorical strategies, which it is hypothesized that must depict two individual wa...