Corpus Linguistics
Using technology and corpora in language teaching and research
Theodorou Maria
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Terrorism and the Media
News frames on Terrorism
Corpora - Research methodology - Tools
Data - Interpretation
Verbs: Prepare, Commit, Instigate
Attributive adjectives
Discussion
REFERENCES APPENDICES
APPENDIX 1: Act of terrorism.
APPENDIX 2: Acts of terrorism.
APPENDIX 3: Attributive adjectives. Act of terrorism.
APPENDIX 4: Terrorism.
APPENDIX 5: Open American National Corpus.
APPENDIX 6: Act, Act…..terrorism.
APPENDIX 7: Verbs: prepare, commit, instigate.
Terrorism and the Media
Over the last two decades a considerable literature has been developed around the theme of terrorism. According to Norris et al. (2003) terrorism can be considered ‘’ the systematic use of coercive intimidation against civilians for political goals’’. The term terrorism embodies a multitude of concepts through which its defenders seek to capture sufficient attention. What the defenders of terrorism also want is their acts to be acknowledged to such an extent so as to possess a mechanism of control upon the general public. Thus, a convenient means to communicate their objectives to the rest of the world relies on the contemporary news media and the way it frames events and disseminates information.
Events and pieces of information are highlighted, cognitively primed and evaluated through printed publications building a fundamental consensus among the press, the defenders of terrorism, the public and the governmental policy agendas (Hoffman, 2006). Thus, terrorism is illustrated as a method rather than a dogma and the news media as their ‘’legitimate ‘’sources which concur to the promotion of terrorist activity in the international arena (Norris et al, 2003).
Several studies have explored the relationship between the media and perpetrators of terrorism and have indicated that the latter deliberately act in such a manner in order to attract media attention (Rohner & Frey, 2007). With this intention, defenders of terrorism highly regard the time and their targets in order to effectively communicate their goals since the media serves their purposes by embracing the audience’s eagerness to seek information about terrorists’ attacks (Seib and Janbek, 2011).
Similarly, Seib and Janbek (2011) uphold that perpetrators of terror apprehend and exploit the audience’s psychological effect of fear. Not only do they utilize it as a strategic tool in the aftermath of acts of terrorism portrayed by the media to ensure coverage but they also reinforce audience’s predispositions and expectations in terms of the
‘’us and them dichotomy’’. Most compelling evidence suggests that it is the sensationalism of terrorism that attains favourable publicity and serves multiple interests (Rohner & Frey, 2007).
In terms of a Media Triangle, Lewis (2005) advocates that the media estimate the level of sensationalism coming from the acts of terrorism depending on their target audience since the audience’s response is determined by factors such as the phenomenology of the text and its producers , the culture the audience is nurtured by and the legitimacy of governments.
Media Triangle (Lewis, 2005)
Regrettably, it is the financial aid that the media receive from the political and legal system that tailors media’s quality and their newsworthiness (Frey & Lüchinger, 2003). Governments, in turn, contribute to the transformation and shaping of audience’s sphere to serve their hegemony and blur the boundaries between acts of brutal terror and acts of ideologically military war for the sake of state and
civilians’ interests (Lewis, 2005). In this perspective, Rohner and Frey (2007) argues that only if the media did not allow for further recognition of the acts of terrorism, would the defenders of terrorism be unable to seize power in the community and hence their motivation would be significantly reduced.
Turning to the purpose of this paper, it is divided into four main parts. The first part of this paper will give an account of news frames. The second part moves on to utilize the corpus based approach in order to quantitatively and qualitatively extracts and analyse the linguistic frames which reign in two specialized corpora. Both corpora were compiled under the term ‘’terrorism’’ and encapsulate collections of British national newspaper articles and American newspapers articles and newswires distributed in a major metropolitan readership from January 1, 2005 until November 30, 2015. This paper will then go on to bring the ‘’ incremental effect’’ of newspaper discourse to light (Baker, 2006) and indicate the conspicuous presence of news frames included in both the UK and the US newspaper coverage as well as the presumptions they embody. It will conclude by ascertaining that not only are the linguistic frames featured in the representative samples of the UK and the US newspapers all too frequently repeated during the last decade but they also expedite terrorists’ worldwide publicity and the achievement of their goals.
News frames on Terrorism
Although differences of opinion still exist, it appears to be some agreement that news frames refer to ‘’selected, highlighted and connected facets of events in such a way so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and/or solution’’ (Entman, 2004). Entman (2004) classifies news framing into a) substantive in which news frames acknowledge issues as problematic, determine causes, indicate judgment or offer solutions to problematic issues or b) procedural where authorized representatives of events and actors are evaluated.
De Vreese (2005) supports that news framing has its roots to the dynamic communicative process of humans. A newspaper frame is ‘’an emphasis in salience of different aspects of a topic’’ and is associated with frame building (factors that affect the structure), frame setting(interaction between media and readership predisposition) and the consequences at an individual (attitude towards an issue) as well as societal level (political, decision making, collective actions).
A case-study approach was adopted by Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) who analysed news frames both inductively and deductively and came up with five news frames: 1) conflict (individuals, institutions, countries), 2) human interest (individual, emotional aspect fronted), 3)attribution of responsibility (caused or resolved by the government, individual or a group), 4) morality (religion, ethics) and 5) economic consequences (at an individual, group or national level).
Furthermore, in a study conducted by Benford and Snow (2000)) collective action frames were divided into diagnostic (descriptive), prognostic (solutions) and motivational (urge participation). Some collective frames convey ideology according to social, political or religious criteria abstaining from violence while others’ violent content has the sole purpose to dehumanize, confront or isolate actors (Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000).
Corpora - Research methodology – Tools
For the purpose of this piece of work two specialized and diachronic corpora around the term ‘’terrorism’’ ‘’ at the start’’ were compiled through the database NEXIS. Baker (2006) advocates that a specialized corpus represents a ‘’ language variety or a genre’’ and it is used in order to assist in the investigation of ‘’ the discursive construction of a subject’’ whereas a diachronic corpus represents language in a specific period of time. The first corpus compilation is a collection of UK national newspaper articles from January 1, 2005 until November 30, 2015. The second corpus is a collection of US newspapers articles and newswires
from January 1, 2005 until November 30, 2015 respectively. They were compiled in connection with their representation of the inclusive view they hold in terms of the UK and the US cultural identities as they represent different geographical areas. In this context, the Open American National Corpus (OANC), which is a roughly 15 million word subset of the ANC second release was used as a reference corpus for comparable reasons. Its type / token ratio can represent the ‘’normal’’ data of the language variety used in the articles of both UK and US newspaper articles (Baker, 2006) with the intention to assist in the revelation of a particular news discourse (Hunston, 2002). Table 1. illustrates the number of articles and the number of tokens per corpus.
PUBLICATION
NEMBER OF ARTICLES
% OF CORPUS
TOKENS
UK NATIONAL PAPERS
9777 (30, 29%- (16, 98%)
US NEWSPAPERS AND WIRES
9741 (30, 18%- (32, 39%)
OANC
12762 (39, 54%- (50, 64%)
TOTAL-%- (100%)
Table 1.
The first step in this process was through the freeware corpus analysis toolkit Ant Conc. Both the UK and the US specialized corpora were compared to the OANC reference corpus. A Cluster/ N-Gram search was conducted under the Search Term ‘’terrorism’’ sort ‘’by frequency’’ ‘’ on right’’ and a Cluster Size: Min 5/ Max 5. The results revealed that the two prevalent Clusters in both corpora are ‘’act(s) of terrorism’’. Table 2. provides the results obtained.
UK CorporaUS Corpora
Cluster/ N-Gram
Frequency
Cluster
Frequency
Cluster
Types: 435
Tokens:-
Acts of terrorism
Types: 1103
Tokens:-
Acts of terrorism
Types: 283
Tokens: 670
105
Act of terrorism
Types: 638
Tokens:-
Act of terrorism
Table 2.
In order to consider the frequencies beyond single words (Baker, 2006) a further search to the right of the N-Gram ‘’act(s) of terrorism’’ revealed the textual semantic associations of the patterns with the transitive verbs ‘’prepare’’, ‘’commit’’ and ‘’instigate’’ which were supplementary analysed through the corpus manager and analysis software Sketch Engine. The sketching or node words provided a summary of each word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour that co-occurs within the underlying Corpus en Ten Ten (2013) which counts 22,878,431,750 tokens, 19,717,205,676 words, 1,068,908,931 sentences, 404,957,680 paragraphs and 37,061,973 documents.
Table 3. and Table 4. present the summary statistics for both patterns ‘’Act(s) of terrorism’’ and their textually associated verbs.
Table 3.
Table 4.
Data – Interpretation
Act(s) of terrorism
The most striking result to emerge from the data is that both newspaper markets lexically prime the pattern of association (Hunston, 2002) ‘’ act(s) of terrorism’’ in a frequent manner in order to implicitly convey and strengthen messages that influence the masses. These results corroborate Hoey’s (2005) definition of ‘’collocation’’ who accentuates that it is ‘’a psychological association between words (rather than lemmas) up to four words apart and is evidenced by their occurrence together in corpora more often than is explicable in terms of random distribution’’ whose most important characteristic is that of ‘’ semantic priming’’ which promotes the replication of language in order to make a text coherent. For Hoey (2005), priming can either be productive (repeated) or receptive (occurring in impossible discourses). According to Stubbs (2011), not only does the systemic repetition of the patterns
show a salient ideology and evaluation but it also shows a collective ideology shared by a discourse community which fosters a common cultural stereotype. By the same token, ‘’the textual semantic association of a pattern is the semantic relations of this pattern in a discourse’’ which is associated with the psychological preference of the person using the pattern (Hoey, 2005). As a consequence, the wide readership is manipulated due to the primacy effect of the pattern (Baker, 2006) and, accordingly, selects to read articles analogous to its cognitive bias which is channeled by the normativities of inequality met within the area of influence of human communication (Blommaert, 2005).
Other important findings, gathered by an enTenTen (2013) corpus- derived summary of the grammatical and collocational behaviour of the noun ‘’act’’ ( freq = 1,734,630) through the analysis software Sketch Engine, demonstrated that the noun ‘’act’’ colligates with the verb ‘’be’’ on the right (Word sketch item ‘’object of’’ 126,709 )and on the left (Word sketch item ‘’subject of’’ 74,929) position and shows semantic preference towards verbs such as ‘’commit’’(29,102) ,’’do’’ (20,211) and ‘’perform’’(18,167). Baker (2006) makes the distinction between semantic preference and discourse prosody. The patterns of a word, lemma or phrase denote meaning (semantic preference) as well as attitude (discourse prosody). Analysis yielded that the noun ‘’act’’ shows a colligational preference for the qualitative / evaluative adjectives in the attributive position such (5,650), necessary (458), wrong ( 388), illegal (382) and similar (315) and the classifying adjectives in attributive position- other (118,100), first (17,992), criminal (16,946) and such (15,582). An ‘’act’’ is something that one engages (8,095), involves (3,405) and participates (1,529) in but it could be of crime
(156) or sin (121) against humanity (116). The dispersion of the word ‘’act’’ occurs in the framework [noun+ of] which categorises the relationship of the two into the word class of colligation (Hoey, 2004). A sketch engine analysis on the raw frequencies of the noun ‘’act’’ revealed that the co-occurrence of the frameowrk ‘’act of’’ occurs 10,637 times. Also, an ‘’ act’’ could be of – violence (19,926), kindness (15,047), or an act of God (8,497).
A supplementary sketch engine analysis on the raw frequencies of the noun ‘act’ filtered by the noun ‘’terrorism’’ revealed an enTenTen [2013] frequency of 10,637 results. The noun ‘’act’’ appears as a premodifier of the noun ’’terrorism’’ and shows colligational preference for the preposition ‘’of’’ which as a textual colligation ‘’ act of’’ shows a colligational preference for the complement function for the noun ‘’terrorism’’ acting as a head (Hoey, 2005). The pattern ‘’act
of terrorism ‘’ shows that such actions are ‘’committed’’, prevented’’, ‘’condemned’’ as well as ‘’ incited’’. The raw frequencies of ‘’and/or’’ associated the pattern ‘’act of terrorism’’ with a ’’disaster’’. The pattern shows a semantic association with adjectives such as ‘’ heinous’’, ‘’deadly’’, ‘’horrific’ or ‘’criminal’’ in the attributive position that premodify and qualitatively/ negatively evaluate it ascribing negative discourse prosody (Hoey, 2005). This means that the writers of both newspapers productively prime the pattern’’ act of terrorism’’. In this perspective, Fairclogh (2001) claims that writers use lexical patterns in such as way that they fulfill the needs of their ideological discourse. For Van Leeuwen (2008), social actor’s theory collocates are either nominative (identity) or categorized (function) and represent the discourse and ideology of a text. Consequently, one can assume that the pattern’’ act of terrorism’’ is an ideological collocation since it hegemonically co-occurs in the collections of UK and US newspapers subverting the representations of participants and events within texts and discourses (Salama, 2011).
Verbs: Prepare, Commit, Instigate
An additional sketch engine analysis of the verbs ‘’ prepare’’, ‘’commit’’ and ‘’instigate’’ that were found to be textually associated with the pattern’’ act(s) of terrorism’’ indicate the following:
Commit (verb)
enTenTen [2013] freq =1,530,277
According to the lexical and semantic classification of verbs (Korhonen & Briscoe, 2004) the transitive verb ‘commit’ belongs to the class of dedication and charge. The raw frequencies of a sketch engine analysis of the verb ‘’commit’’ reveal that it shows a negative semantic/discourse prosody for actions that are considered violations both at a legal and religious level as it collocates with nouns such as ‘’crime, suicide, act, sin, murder, fraud and offence’’. ‘’Commit’’ is an action performed by ‘people’, a ‘ person’, a ‘ man’, a ‘ government’ or a ‘company’, an ‘individual’ and a ‘member’ and it is performed against a ‘civilian’, ‘population’, a ‘citizen’, ‘humanity’ and a ‘victim’. The ‘’and/or’’ classification results are with verbs such as ‘dedicate’,’ focus’, ‘engage’ and ‘ motivate’. The sketch engine results showed that people or a group of people with authority commit actions in the ‘name’ of either a nation, an ideology or belief.
Prepare(verb)
enTenTen [2013] freq = 3,072,546
Lexicosemantically the verb ‘prepare’ belongs to the verb class of Benefactive Alternation (Korhonen & Briscoe, 2004). The raw frequencies of a sketch engine analysis of the verb ‘prepare’’ reveal that it shows a colligational preference for the qualitative / evaluative
adverbs ‘’not’’ (66,827) and ‘’well’’ (37,458) in the attributive position ascribing both negative and positive connotation. The verb ‘prepare’ shows positive semantic prosody as it tends to appear with the noun ‘’student’’ both as a subject (50,031) and an object (8,720). It appears 6,197 and 5,808 times in terms of the ‘’and/or ‘’ classification with ‘’plan’’ and ‘’serve’’ while it is an action to ‘’take, ‘’go’’ or ‘’do’’ in
‘’advance’’, in a ’’way’’ or in ‘’accordance’’.
Instigate (verb)
enTenTen [2013] freq = 44,765
According to the verb classes of Kipper et al. (2007) the verb ‘’instigate’’ belongs to the verb class of ‘establish’ as it describes activities that bring organizations or ideas into existence. The raw frequencies of a sketch engine analysis of the verb ‘’instigate’’ reveal that it also shows a colligational preference for qualitative / evaluative adverbs such as ‘’thus’’ (62), ‘’deliberately’’ (57) and ‘’immediately’’ (53) in the attributive position. It shows a negative semantic prosody to the right with words such as ‘’ war’’, ‘’violence’’ and ‘’fight’’ as well as to the left with words such as ‘’ Satan’’, ‘’devil’’ and ‘’riot’’. Actions are instigated by ‘’Satan’’, ‘’devil’’, ‘’Stalin’’ or even ‘’Hitler’’.
Attributive adjectives
To investigate our hypothesis that the media facilitate the objectives of defenders of terror by making use of sensational attributive adjectives that modify the pattern ‘’act of terrorism’’ we carefully examined the clusters formed to the right of the pattern. The results are summarised in Table 5.
#Total No. of Cluster Types: 283
#Total No. of Cluster Tokens:670
#Total No. of Cluster Types: 394
#Total No. of Cluster Tokens: 517
UK newspapers ‘’ Act of terrorism’’
US newspapers ‘’Act of terrorism’’
Adjectives
Adjectives
barbaric act potential act terrible act callous and disgusting act worst act gross act appalling act despicable act
horrendous act
mindless act catastrophic act deadliest act fatal act sickening act atrocious act evil act spectacular" act infamous act
reprehensible
act
heinous act senseless act outrageous act unspeakable act vicious act certified" act alleged act intended act potential act
monstrous act
cruel and atrocious act cowardly act threatening an act worst act
horrendous act despicable act major act horrific act
inhumane act unfortunate act cowardly act premeditated act deplorable act barbaric act deliberate, planned act murderous bloody act
Table 5.
According to the pronominal syntactic position an adjective modifies of a noun in four ways: a) the central properties, b) the temporal interval,
c) the denotation assignment function and d) expression of extreme property (McNally & Kennedy, 2008). As depicted in the Table 5., the majority of adjectives that were used to communicatively modify the pattern ‘’act of terrorism’’ and ascribe a subjective interpretation (Morzycki, 2013). They can be classified as sensorial extreme degree epithets with qualitative and evaluative properties which grant subjective negative judgment. They can also be identified as attitudinal emotive factives since they surmise the truth of the pattern ‘’act of terrorism’’. A further characterization could be this of appositive adjectives as they express a central property to the noun ‘’act’’ and assign concepts to its denotation (McNally & Kennedy, 2008).
Discussion
Research based on the fields of sociology and psychology determines the relationship between the media marketplace and the general public as
‘’mechanistic’’ (Jewkes, 2004) during which the passive public is exposed to a manipulative ‘’concept of hegemony’’ based on the validity of information and representation of events. Sociologists make use of the term ‘’social construction of reality’’ when they refer to the pervasive medium that connects the sender and the receiver of a message, aka the mass medium or mass media in its plural form. Hence, this ‘’social construction of reality’’ acts as a socializing agent and the force which averts clashes or unites individuals since it determines the processes of our social relations in terms of social structure and individual intentional and unintentional agency (Croteau et al., 2014).
Returning to the initial hypothesis, it is now possible to state that both the UK and the US newspaper agencies have adopted a jointly devised scheme to alleviate their insatiable hunger for tragedy, the audience’s interest and circulation as well as to facilitate the interactivity among the audience, terrorists, the media content and the state officials in a micro level (personal life) and macro level (economy, politics, development) (Croteau et al., 2014) as corners of the media triangle (Lewis, 2005). This corpus based analysis can foster the audience’s awareness of the discoursive monopolies that manipulate linguistic patterns to such an extent so as to underlie a stance which allows an established social or political supremacy (Locke, 2004).
The investigation of the verbs ‘commit’ and ‘instigate’ that are textually associated to the frame ‘’act of terrorism’’ revealed that they ascribe negative discourse prosody to the frame both at legal and religious levels. Similarly, the verb ‘prepare’ as Benefactive appertain to the equation ‘x acts on y for the benefit of z’ or ‘x causes z to have y’ (Nisbet, 2005) which implies causality for the benefit of an agent.
Correspondingly, the attributive extreme degree adjectives used by both the UK and the US newspapers impute negative judgment towards the frame ‘’act of terrorism’’.
This, points towards the media as a wild card that serves the purposes of those who want to operate their murderous regimes effectively and those who allegedly want to fight terrorism (Nacos, 2006). As presented in the tables below, a Cluster search of the word ‘’terrorism’’ ‘’by frequency’’ ‘’ on right’’ exposed that while some want to glorify and fund terrorism others fight, combat and counter it adopting a ‘’rally round the flag’’ concept (Nacos, 2006). Thus, the ‘’terrorism of expression’’ (Nacos, 2006) reflects a good sense of drama and urgency for the acceptance or rejection of terrorists’ morals in our contemporary social system (Nacos 2006).
UK TERRORISM
250
200
150
100
#Total No. of Cluster Types: 2366 #Total No. of Cluster Tokens: 29093
50
0
fightcombatglorifyfund
US TERRORISM
-
countercombatfight
#Total No. of Cluster Types: 3805 #Total No.…
These findings enhance the hypothesis that terrorists’ ‘’propaganda of the deed’’ (Nacos, 2006) utilize the sensational impact of the ‘’social construction of reality’’ to claim equal rights for publicity and status (Nacos, 2006) turning events into acts of substantial content (Jewkes, 2004) that are immediately consumed by an audience which is victimized and held subject to the danger and fear of acts of terrorism (Osborne, 2002).
References
Baker, P. ( 2006). Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum.
Benford, R. & Snow, D. (2000). Framing Processes and Social Movements: an Overview and Assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611- 639.
Blommaert, J. ( 2005). Discourse. A critical introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Croteau, D., Hoynes, W. & Milan, S. (2014). Media society. Industries, images and audiences (4th ed.). London: Sage.
De Vreese, C. (2005). News Framing: Theory and typology. Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Entman, R. (2004). Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fairclough, N. (2001) Language and Power (2nd ed.). New York: Longman.
Frey, B. & Luechinger, S. (2003). How to fight terrorism: alternatives to deterrence. Defense and Peace Economics, 14, 237 – 249.
Hoey, M. (2004).Textual Colligation: A Special Kind of Lexical Priming.
Language and Computers, 49(1), 171-194.
Hoey, M. (2005). Lexical Priming. A new theory of words and language. London: Routledge.
Hoffman, B. (2006). Inside terrorism. Revised and expanded edition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jewkes, Y. (2004). Media and crime. London: Sage.
Kipper, K., Korhonen, A., Ryant, N. & Palmer, A. (2007). A Large-scale Classification of English Verbs. Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Korhonen, A. & Briscoe, T. ( 2004). Extended Lexical-Semantic Classification of English Verbs. Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL Workshop on Computational Lexical Semantics, 38-45.
Lewis, J. (2005). Language Wars. The Role of Media and Culture in Global Terror and Political Violence. London: Pluto Press.
Locke, T. (2004). Critical Discourse analysis. London: Continuum.
McNally, L. & Kennedy, C. (2008). Adjectives and Adverbs Syntax, Semantics, and Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morzycki, M. (2013).The Lexical Semantics of Adjectives: More Than Just Scales. In M. Morzycki (Ed.), Modification (pp.1-84). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nacos, B. (2006). Terrorism/Counterterrorism and Media in the Age of Global Communication. United Nations University Global Seminar Second Shimame-Yamaguchi Session, Terrorism—A Global Challenge.
Nisbet, T. (2005). Benefactives in English: evidence against argumenthood. Reading Working Papers in Linguistics, 8, 51-67.
Norris, P., Kern, M. & Just, M. (2003). Framing Terrorism. The news media, the government and the public. London: Routledge.
Osborne, R. (2002). Megawords. London: Sage.
Rohner, D. & Frey, B. (2007). Blood and ink! The common-interest-game between terrorists and the media. Public choice, 133(1), 129-145.
Salama, A. (2011). Ideological collocation and the recontexualization of Wahhabi-Saudi Islam post-9/11: A synergy of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society,22 (3), 315–342.
Seib, P. & Janbek, D. (2011). Global Terrorism and New Media. The post- Al Qaeda generation. London: Routledge.
Semetko, H. & Valkenburg, P. (2000). Framing European politics: A content analysis of press and television news. Journal of Communication, 50(2), 93–109.
Stubbs, M. (2011). Sequence and order: The meo-Firthian tradition of corpus semantics. In H. Hassalgard, J. Ebeling & S. Oksefjell (Eds.), Corpus perspectives on patterns of lexis. Amsterdam: John Benjamin.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and practice: New tools for critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
APPENDICES
APPENDIX 1: Act of terrorism.
UK
ACT OF TERRORISM
#Total No. of Cluster Types: 283
#Total No. of Cluster Tokens: 670
FREQUENCY
RANGE
CLUSTER
105
21
committing or preparing an act
81
16
or instigation of an act
USA
ACT OF TERRORISM
#Total No. of Cluster Types: 638
#Total No. of Cluster Tokens: 1187
FREQUENCY
RANGE
CLUSTER
120
27
committing or preparing an act
84
18
or instigation of an act
APPENDIX 2: Acts of terrorism.
UK
ACTS OF TERRORISM
#Total No. of Cluster Types: 435
#Total No. of Cluster Tokens: 1126
FREQUENCY
RANGE
CLUSTER
244
19
preparation or instigation of acts
38
9
the intention of committing acts
USA
ACTS OF TERRORISM
#Total No. of Cluster Types: 1103
#Total No. of Cluster Tokens: 2179
FREQUENCY
RANGE
CLUSTER
265
26
preparation or instigation of acts
45
12
the intention of committing acts
APPENDIX 3: Attributive adjectives. Act of terrorism.
UK
ACT OF TERRORISM
#Total No. of Cluster Types: 283
#Total No. of Cluster Tokens:-
this appalling and barbaric act information about a potential act seen such a terrible act
a "callous and disgusting act cult behind the worst act people died, a "gross act this is an appalling act
undoubtedly a 'pre-planned act a calculated and despicable act attack as a "horrendous act attacks as a mindless act
beyond exaggeration . . . the worst act britain before a terrible act
charge as "a gross act consulate was 'pre-planned act described as "a barbaric act
have prevented a catastrophic act history and the deadliest act investigation into this gross act
is the first fatal act it as a "sickening act it is an atrocious act itself, not an evil act
killings were a "sickening act last so-called "spectacular" act lives in this mindless act
of being the deadliest act
to prevent a "catastrophic act way with the infamous act
US
ACT OF TERRORISM
#Total No. of Cluster Types: 394
#Total No. of Cluster Tokens:-
financiers and sponsors of this reprehensible act to the victims of this heinous act
neither this, nor any other senseless act
airport. "i strongly condemn this outrageous act and families affected by this unspeakable act
as a result of a vicious act
in the event of a "certified" act to the victims "of this heinous act
who were murdered in a heinous act action must be certified as an act action will be certified as an act
add any details on the alleged act
any details on the allegedly intended act are under investigation as a potential act attack. the definition of a certified act called the committed crime a monstrous act can the perpetrators of this heinous act condemns such a cruel and atrocious act board, harris ranch and a cowardly act convicted in june 2004 of threatening an act eight years ago in the worst act
except the perpetrators) for that horrendous act expressed their condemnation over "this despicable act financiers and sponsors of that "reprehensible act financiers and sponsors of that reprehensible act
fitting that suspects of the worst act
gmt un security council condemns 'heinous act group. "unless there is a major act
high school student committed "an intentional act how is charleston's tragedy an act
june 23, 1985, canadians experienced the most horrific act killed 168 people and is the worst act
killing 168 people -- characterized as the worst act many sacrifices in confronting the inhumane act marathon bombing was hastily labeled an act mark the anniversary of the worst act
months. "(the jammu massacre) was unfortunate act now recognize as the single worst act
obama says it was an "outrageous act
of the russian federation: the massive act oh, i should clarify: the cowardly act
pakistan, who have confronted the inhumane act s homecoming procession as a "heinous act
terrorism comments online. unfortunately, their cowardly act that the attack was a premeditated act
the recent bombings are a deplorable act
348
1
1
their role in the most heinous act
364
1
1
today said those behind the "reprehensible act
367
1
1
two brothers carried out this horrific act
371
1
1
utterly condemn this appalling and barbaric act
374
1
1
victim to a yet another heinous act
375
1
1
video rather than a deliberate, planned act
378
1
1
we condemn this new murderous bloody act
APPENDIX 4: Terrorism.
UK
TERRORISM
#Total No. of Cluster Types: 2366
#Total No. of Cluster Tokens: 29093
RANK
FREQUENCY
RANGE
CLUSTER-
fight terrorism-
combat terrorism-
glorifying terrorism-
funding terrorism
USA
TERRORISM
#Total No. of Cluster Types: 3805
#Total No. of Cluster Tokens:-
counter terrorism-
combat terrorism-
fight terrorism
APPENDIX 5: Open American National Corpus.
Open American National Corpus
Name
Domain
No. files
No. words
charlotte
face to face
93
198,295
Spoken Totals
93
198,295
Written
Name
Domain
No. files
No. words
911 report
government, technical
17
281,093
biomed
technical
837
3,349,714
eggan
fiction
1
61,746
icic
letters
245
91,318
oup
non-fiction
45
330,524
plos
technical
252
409,280
slate
journal
4,531
4,238,808
verbatim
journal
32
582,384
web data
government
285
1,048,792
Written Totals
6424
11,406,155
Corpus Totals
8,653
13,611,431
APPENDIX 6: Act, Act…..terrorism.
Act (noun)
enTenTen [2013] freq = 1,734,630 (75.81 per million)
object_of
488,260
0.00
be
126,709
2.36
commit
29,102
8.63
do
20,211
2.64
perform
18,167
6.78
subject_of
203,318
0.00
be
74,929
1.60
adj_subject_of
32,771
0.00
such
5,650
3.18
necessary
458
1.87
wrong
388
1.89
illegal
382
3.70
similar
315
1.11
modifier
1,012,372
-0.00
other
18,100
4.02
first
17,992
4.93
criminal
16,946
8.17
such
15,582
4.58
pp_obj_in-i
74,972
0.00
engage
8,095
6.72
catch
3,405
5.27
involve
2,048
3.11
participate
1,529
4.35
predicate_of
14,110
0.00
crime
156
1.15
sin
121
1.53
pp_against-i
5,640
0.00
humanity
116
2.33
pp_of-i
346,784
0.00
violence
19,926
8.17
kindness
15,047
9.53
terrorism
10,637
8.86
God
8,497
4.65
terror
3,979
7.45
Act…..terrorism (noun)
enTenTen [2013] freq = 10,637 (0.46 per million) (act-n filtered by terrorism-n)
act: object_of
3,663
-3.40
commit
773
3.72
prevent
212
1.30
condemn
133
3.59
terrorism: object_of
542
-6.10
commit
104
0.82
act: and/or
1,132
-5.20
disaster
101
1.44
act: modifier
3,063
-5.00
future
91
0.39
heinous
63
5.69
deadly
48
2.26
horrific
46
3.75
disaster
45
0.27
violent
42
1.39
cowardly
40
5.09
APPENDIX 7: Verbs: prepare, commit, instigate.
Prepare (verb)
enTenTen [2013] freq = 3,072,546 (134.29 per million)
object
1,199,362
0.00
student
50,031
6.52
subject
424,372
0.00
student
8,720
4.06
infin_comp
572,980
0.10
take
23,250
4.09
go
15,047
3.44
do
14,501
2.16
pay
13,643
5.36
make
13,635
2.73
Commit (verb)
enTenTen [2013] freq = 1,530,277 (66.88 per million)
object
756,895
0.00
crime
91,220
9.94
suicide
55,-
act
29,104
7.89
sin
19,359
8.23
murder
16,625
8.30
fraud
13,254
8.05
offence
11,850
8.4
subject
238,190
0.00
people
10,466
2.64
person
7,942
4.30
man
5,227
2.97
government
4,456
3.62
individual
2,906
3.62
someone
2,839
3.54
member
2,350
2.13
company
2,248
1.38
and/or
25,457
0.00
dedicate
1,540
5.19
focus
998
2.75
engage
711
3.24
motivate
682
5.00
pp_against-i
9,485
0.10
civilian
263
4.60
population
178
0.60
citizen
156
0.91
humanity
150
2.69
victim
131
0.90
pp_in-i
21,351
0.00
name
1,780
2.00
Instigate (verb)
enTenTen [2013] freq = 44,765 (1.95 per million)
object
29,735
0.00
change
1,084
1.50
war
696
2.34
violence
679
3.52
action
410
0.63
fight
400
2.78
attack
383
1.59
modifier
5,203
-0.00
thus
62
0.73
deliberately
57
3.14
immediately
53
0.17
allegedly
52
2.99
largely
51
1.14
subject
13,338
0.00
canada
93
1.87
Satan
44
2.04
devil
29
1.42
riot
24
1.64
Jews
24
0.38
CIA
21
1.42
Hitler
21
1.22
pp_by-i
5,268
0.10
Satan
26
1.31
devil
17
0.68
Stalin
9
1.44
Hitler
9
0.04