Applying word space models to sociolinguistics 131change, but it goes hand in hand with tighter links to war, religion and cul-
ture as well.
3.3. Comparing newspapers
So far we have talked about our subcorpora as two undifferentiated wholes.
However, both are made up of articles from five newspapers, taken together
to give the aggregated results in the sections above. Obviously, these news-
papers differ in a number of respects. NRC Handelsblad is the main quality
newspaper in The Netherlands, and like De Volkskrant, it targets a highly
educated audience. Trouw, another quality newspaper, has a specific focus
on religious and philosophical issues. Algemeen Dagblad, with a far broad-
er target audience, is the most popular newspaper in our corpus. Het Parool,
finally, is often considered a left-wing newspaper and mainly focuses on
Amsterdam in its news coverage. Given these differences, it is only to be
expected that the several newspapers also distinguish themselves in their
use of the words under investigation – something that the combined results
do not give us access to. In this final section we will therefore focus on the
individual newspapers and investigate if they indeed display significant
differences in their use of the terms we are investigating. As we are now
working on much smaller corpora, the syntax-based model starts to suffer
from data sparseness. Therefore we will continue working with the docu-
ment-based model only.
As above, we calculated the relatedness between the lexical fields of ter-
rorism, war, religion, culture and our small set of words referring directly to
Islam or Christianity. This time, however, we based ourselves on the sub-
corpora of the five different newspapers, in order to pin down possible dif-
ferences in their use of these religion names. We will focus here on the
results for islam in the post-9/11 corpus, but obviously the same technique
can be applied to christendom and the pre-9/11 corpus. The results are
shown in Table 6.
The document-based relationship between islam and the field of terror-
ism is clearest in the newspaper Algemeen Dagblad. This is in line with its
status as the most popular newspaper in our corpus. Both for the evolving
and stable lexical fields, it returns the smallest distance between the two.
The pattern is clearest when we look at the stable field. Here Algemeen
Dagblad shows a relatedness of 3.40 between Islam and terrorism, with the
scores of the other papers somewhere between 3.66 (Volkskrant) and 3.73