Abstract

The study mainly examines the connotative meaning of several terms that are frequently used in the media in the political discourse of the September 11^th attacks and the ‘War on Terror’. Eight items were identified which are ‘Sunni’, ‘jihad’, ‘Islamist’, ‘fatwa’, ‘terrorism’, ‘radicalism’, ‘militant’ and ‘fundamentalism’. The study explores the existence of these terms in the Corpus of Contemporary American English in terms of the frequency of the selected terms, collocations and collocation patterns over two periods of time: ten years before and after the September 11^th attacks. The results of the study revealed that the frequency of these terms had remarkably increased after September 11^th and their conceptual meaning had been colored with new connotations.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.