120 Yves Peirsman, Kris Heylen and Dirk Geeraerts
- postmodified by a PP with head n, introduced by preposition p
(pmPP/n_p), - modified by an apposition with head n (app/n), or
- coordinated with head n (cnj/n).
Each specific instantiation of the variables v, p, a, or n leads to a new con-
text feature. For each feature in both models, the context vector of a target
word contains its point-wise mutual information with that target. As above,
the similarity between two vectors is calculated on the basis of the cosine of
the angle between them.
Our data was the Twente Nieuws Corpus, a corpus with 300 million
words of Dutch newspaper text from between 1999 and 2002. The corpus
was developed at the University of Twente and parsed by the Alpino parser
at the University of Groningen. We divided the material into two subcorpo-
ra. The first contained all articles up to August 2001, the other started from
October 2001. This allowed us to contrast word use before and after the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
3.2. Global word use before and after September 11, 2001
The question that concerns us here is whether the use of the religion name
islam has changed after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Intuitively, most
people would argue it has indeed. It is often felt that Islam as a religion is
now more clearly linked to terrorism than it was before and, as a result, is
often covered in a more negative way by the news media. These intuitions,
however, are in need of an empirical foundation. Only a thorough usage-
based linguistic study can show if indeed the link between Islam and terror-
ism has become clearer and additionally, if this is also true for other reli-
gions like Christianity. For such a large-scale study, the analytical tools of
Critical Discourse Analysis do not suffice anymore. We will therefore use
our word space models to map the use of the words islam ‘Islam’ and chris-
tendom ‘Christianity’ in the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 parts of our corpus,
both in terms of syntax-based and document-based distribution. We will
then study the results, both in a diachronic (before and after 9/11) and a
synchronic (islam vs christendom) way. Finally, we will investigate if there
are any differences between the individual newspapers.