Hidden treasure or irrational beast? Metaphors for cryptocurrencies between social journalism and specialised press

This chapter reports on a stage in an ongoing research project on cryptocurrency-related metaphors in different media. It explores how cryptocurrencies are metaphorically framed in two collections of texts, published on the social journalism website Medium and in The Wall Street Journal, online edition, between September 2017 and February 2018 – when Bitcoin (the cryptocurrency par excellence) experienced one of its most notable and recent boom-bust events. The theoretical background merges two frameworks providing complementary discourse analytical perspectives: Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) and Grammatical Metaphor Theory: nominalisation (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999). Findings show that the main source concepts involved in the metaphorical representation of cryptocurrencies are basically constant across the two collections of texts, while also being in line with the conceptualisation of more “traditional” financial and economic notions unveiled by previous studies. At the same time, an important difference between the datasets emerges in the metaphorical framing of cryptocurrencies, realised through conceptual metaphors and nominalisations alike, with concordances from the WSJ corpus more frequently enacting a negative/pessimistic framing in comparison to Medium. Overall, the findings also confirm the tendency of conceptual metaphors and nominalisations to play synergistic functions in terms of framing and event-construal.