Terrorism as Order-Word
Date
2002
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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en_US
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
Terrorism shapes opinions about the events and groups to which the term is
applied in the media. In the days after September 11, 2001, terrorism and terrorist
attacks were applied overwhelmingly to the events of September 11, 2001. The meaning
of terrorism, we will argue, also encompasses a group of people. We will demonstrate in
data from September 12 - 15, 2001 from the New York Times, LA Times, and
Washington Post the word's ability to signify these two things at once. We will show
how the word's semantic peculiarity, which we will call cosignification, is facilitated by a
morphological peculiarity. We will also discuss the implications of this semantic
ambiguity for the socio-political significance of the term, using Whorf and Deleuze and
Guattari.