The study of terror, terrorise, terrorism, terrorist in two Nigerian newspapers

Abstract

This article studies words which cluster around or are found in the company of terror, terrorise, terrorism, and terrorists in two Nigerian online newspapers retrieved around the Nigerian elections of 2011. The aim is to get a better understanding of the term terrorism by studying its collocates as well as the collocates of its related terms terror, terrorise and terrorist. The study does not examine the political or ideological motives, the causes or goals of terrorism. Instead, it appeals to concordance analysis as well as Mutual Information (MI) measures as primary approaches of word association analysis. The results of the studyreveal that words such as kidnapping, armed robbery, assassination, oppression, killing, and heinous crimes are found in close proximity with terrorism. Keywords: Mutual Information (MI), concordance, terrorism, collocation, corpus, collocate.