Stylistic Deceptions in Online News

Abstract

This kind of project is always a group effort. I am very grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for the generous grant which allowed me to conduct the project that culminated in this volume, and for funding its publication in Open Access format. At University College London (UCL), I was incredibly fortunate to be mentored by Federico M. Federici and to have access to workspace, facilities, and great interdisciplinary minds as a visiting research fellow at UCL's Institute for Advanced Studies. Thanks also to the team at University of Granada's Facultad de Traducción e Interpretación for facilitating my research stay, and especially to my amiga-hermana Elvira Cámara Aguilera for our discussions on Spanish metaphor, for her kindness, and for our friendship. While in Spain, I visited Esperança Bielsa, who gave me feedback on one of my articles, and María José Hernández Guerrero, who generously shared her time and her ideas. A whole host of colleagues at the Faculté de traduction et d'interprétation of the Université de Genève have provided invaluable advice, and I would particularly like to thank Lucile Davier for giving me suggestions for reading, and for sharing precious insights on everything from research design to career planning; Mathilde Fontanet, Valérie Dullion, Lucía Morado Vazquez, Samantha Cayron, and Véronique Bohn for discussing style and nuance in French and Spanish, and/or for the useful feedback they provided when attending mock presentations about my project. It was extremely helpful that my former supervisor, Professor Emeritus Lance Hewson, and my father, Larry Riggs, were available to read some of my material and help me improve it, and that Greg Giannakis was willing to take care of many not-inspiring, but nonetheless essential, tasks related to formatting and usage. It was a delight to work with Andrew Wardell and Becky Holland of Bloomsbury: I am grateful to them and their whole team for their professionalism and efficiency. Bloomsbury, as well as Roberto Valdeón at Perspectives and Alexander Kuenzli at Parallèles, also kindly gave me permission to use portions of material I had published with them previously. Finally, special thanks go to my mother for her company during a working summer, and to Alan for a better partnership than I could ever have imagined.On the night of July 14, 2016, just after thousands of residents and tourists had finished watching a fireworks display in celebration of Bastille Day, a violent attack took place in Nice, France. The perpetrator, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, drove a truck through the crowds, killing eighty-six people and injuring 434 others. This attack came relatively soon after two other very serious attacks in France in January and November 2015, similar for their high number of fatalities-the so-called Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks-which were still etched in people's minds and which had also determined security policies, such as a state of emergency, that were still in place in France but did not prevent this violent act.I chose to...