128 Yves Peirsman, Kris Heylen and Dirk Geeraertswords more related to 9/11 itself: 11 ‘11’, september ‘September’, Ameri-
kaan ‘American (noun)’ and Amerikaans ‘American (adj)’. September 11
has thus had a clear impact on the words that occur together with terrorism
in newspaper articles.
The other sets of words turn out to be equally plausible. The lexical
field of war contains words like militair ‘military’, soldaat ‘soldier’ and
leger ‘army’. After 9/11, there is moreover considerable overlap with the
field of terrorism, with words like strijd ‘battle’, terrorist ‘terrorist’ and
internationaal ‘international’. The field of religion, then, brings together
words like religious ‘religious’, geloof ‘faith’ and God ‘God’, while that of
culture is made up of words like cultureel ‘cultural’, kunst ‘art’ and traditie
‘tradition’. Careful inspection thus shows that these sets of words indeed
form a reasonable basis for the investigation of the document-based rela-
tions of islam and christendom.
Second, it would also be interesting to study the relationship of islam
and christendom to stable lexical fields, which do not evolve through time.
In this way, we filter out the direct influence of newly related words like
Amerikaans or 11. For each of our four central words, we therefore con-
structed a stable lexical field, consisting of the words in the intersection
between the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 lexical fields. We moreover corrected
these fields manually to filter out any words directly related to either Islam
or Christianity. For terrorisme, this resulted in a lexical field consisting of
terrorisme ‘terrorism’, terrorist ‘terrorist’, terroristisch ‘terrorist’ and aan-
slag ‘attack’. For godsdienst, we now have godsdienst ‘religion’, religie
‘religion’, religieus ‘religious’, godsdienstig ‘religious’, geloof ‘faith’, God
‘God’ and gelovig ‘religious’. For oorlog, we found oorlog ‘war’, militair
‘soldier’, soldaat ‘soldier’ and conflict ‘conflict’. The lexical field of cul-
tuur, finally, is made up of cultuur ‘culture’, cultureel ‘cultural’, multicul-
tureel ‘multicultural’, samenleving ‘society’, kunst ‘art’, taal ‘language’,
cultuurbeleid ‘culture policy’, integratie ‘integration’, traditie ‘tradition’,
westers ‘western’, geschiedenis ‘history’ and wereld ‘world’.
Next, we defined the lexical fields of islam and christendom as the sets
of the words islam ‘Islam’, islamitisch ‘Islamic’, moslim ‘Muslim’ and
christendom ‘Christianity’, christelijk ‘Christian (adj)’, christen ‘Christian
(noun)’, respectively. We chose these sets because they both consist of the
noun and adjective referring to the religion itself plus the noun referring to
its followers. Their results should thus be perfectly comparable.
On the basis of these lexical fields, we now want to investigate whether
Islam and Christianity have become more or less closely related to the top-