Applying word space models to sociolinguistics 125dimensions that dominate. The word is often conjoined with other nouns
like islam ‘Islam’, humanisme ‘Humanism’, jodendom ‘Judaism’, hin-
doeïsme ‘Hinduism’, etc. Moreover, all modifying adjectives highly typical
of christendom refer to the history of Christianity (vroeg ‘early’, traditio-
neel ‘traditional’) or to its several subgroups (orthodox ‘orthodox’, protes-
tants ‘protestant’). Islam, by contrast, is characterized by features that refer
to politics. Again these are mainly conjunctions – with democratie ‘democ-
racy’ and integratie ‘integration’, for instance – and modifying adjectives –
like politiek ‘political’ or radicaal ‘radical’. These lists of twenty most
distinguishing dimensions thus explain why the nearest neighbors typical of
islam tended to be of a political nature, while those of christendom were
more oriented towards religion and culture.
3.2.2. Document-based distribution
The syntax-based model has singled out those words in the corpus with the
syntactic profile most similar to that of islam or christendom. We will now
ask a second question: do islam and christendom crop up in different types
of articles after the September 11 attacks? For instance, we might expect
islam to occur more often in articles on terrorism than it used to do. This
change might be absent from christendom, or it might apply to religion
names in general. To answer this second type of question, we have modeled
the use of islam and christendom with a document-based word space mod-
el. As a start, we again calculated the difference in nearest neighbors, first
between the pre-9/11 and the post-9/11 corpus and then between islam and
christendom, as above.
Although the words are different, Table 4 mirrors the patterns we also
observed above. Much more often than before 9/11, islam is now related
with negative words like achterlijk ‘backward’, radicaal ‘radical’ or be-
dreiging ‘threat’. The presence of 11 in this list moreover suggests a direct
relationship to the September 11 attacks. Note that our word space models
do not yet take multi-word units into account. Therefore 11 shows up as an
individual entity in this list, and not yet as a part of the multi-word unit 11
september. The negatively sounding nearest neighbors of islam are absent
from the list of highest climbers to christendom.
This pattern also shows up when we explicitly contrast the list of nearest
neighbors to islam and christendom after 9/11, like we did above for the
syntax-based model. We will not give all results here, but just highlight the