130 Yves Peirsman, Kris Heylen and Dirk Geeraerts
come more pronounced after the September 11 attacks. We see an increase
in relatedness score of 45% for the evolving fields and 55% for the stable
fields. Both times this increase is far larger than that for christendom, with
20% and 27%, respectively. Note that throughout Table 5, the increases in
relatedness score are higher for the evolving lexical fields than for the sta-
ble ones. This is probably because the former often also included words
clearly related to Islam or Christianity, and their proportion was generally
larger after 9/11. By filtering these words from the fields, as we did for the
stable sets of words, the relatedness scores are less subject to change.
As could be expected from the previous result, Islam has also moved
closer to the lexical field of war. Its relatedness value after 9/11 lies 28%
higher when we allow the field of war to change, and 17% higher when we
keep it constant. For christendom this evolution is totally absent: the dis-
tance between the two lexical fields has all but remained the same.
With respect to the lexical field of religion, the observed changes are
much smaller. Both islam and christendom move slightly closer to the sta-
ble lexical field, but they move in different directions when compared with
the evolving field. Apparently, words referring to Islam in particular appear
more often in articles about religion after 9/11, but this evolution is rather
modest.
A much more drastic change takes place in the relationship between the
words referring to our religions and the lexical field of culture. Both reli-
gions have become much more related to culture when we take the evolv-
ing fields into account (38% and 27%, respectively), but have moved only
slightly when we look at the stable lexical field (11% and 8%). This discre-
pancy is caused by the fact that after 9/11, the evolving lexical field of cul-
ture includes words referring to Islam and Christianity directly (christen
‘Christian (adj)’, moslim ‘Muslim (noun)’, etc.). These were filtered out in
the stable lexical field. Either way, it seems safe to conclude that both Islam
and Christianity are now more topically related to issues relating to culture.
With one exception, all evolutions in Table 5 are of a positive nature:
they show how Islam and Christendom occur more often in articles together
with words referring to terrorism and war as well as culture and religion.
This should come as no surprise: as a result of 9/11, the relationship be-
tween religion and terrorism, war, culture and related topics has become a
much hotter topic in the media. In general, it is Islam that has undergone
the major changes. While religion in general has figured more prominently
in newspaper articles, Islam in particular has attracted attention. Its much
closer relationship to the lexical field of terrorism is the most conspicuous