Applying word space models to sociolinguistics 129ics of terrorism, war, culture and religion. The relatedness between two
lexical fields was measured by calculating the average relatedness between
each word in field 1 and each word in field 2. In order to calculate this rela-
tedness between a word pair, we again worked with the logarithm of either
word’s rank in the list of the nearest neighbors to the other word. First we
looked up the rank of word 1 in the list of nearest neighbors to word 2 and
vice versa. We then took the average of the natural logarithm of these ranks
to get a symmetric relatedness score. Each word pair contributed equally to
the total score. Finally, by dividing the relatedness before 9/11 by that after
9/11, we can see if the words have become more closely or less closely
related to the lexical field. The results are given in Table 5. Note that lower
scores indicate a higher relatedness between two fields.
Table 5. Average distance to the lexical fields of terrorism, war, religion and cul-
ture
field 1 type field 2 < 9/11 9/11 > difference
Terrorism evolving Islam 6.58 4.55 1.45
Christianity 8.43 7.03 1.20
stable Islam 5.70 3.69 1.55
Christianity 8.65 6.82 1.27
War evolving Islam 5.96 4.65 1.28
Christianity 7.09 6.92 1.02
stable Islam 5.79 4.94 1.17
Christianity 7.00 6.97 1.00
Religion evolving Islam 3.26 2.93 1.11
Christianity 3.41 3.61 0.95
stable Islam 3.37 2.87 1.05
Christianity 2.63 2.50 1.04Culture evolving Islam 5.87 4.25 1.38
Christianity 6.69 5.26 1.27
stable Islam 5.84 5.24 1.11
Christianity 6.41 5.92 1.08Let us start with the field of terrorism. It is clear that the words referring to
Islam are much more syntagmatically related to the lexical field of terror-
ism than those referring to Christianity. Moreover, this difference has be-