The ‘terroridiom’ principle between spoken and written discourse

This paper focuses on phraseology used within the domain of politics, both in written and spoken discourse. We concentrate on the lemma TERROR and on the recurrent sequences in which it is embedded, reflecting how native speakers, both American and British, tend to use it in preferred environments making routinized blocks of language. The data come from two corpora: the spoken corpus includes speeches of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and the written corpus is made up of articles from The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. Since text is nothing but phraseology of one kind or another (Sinclair 2008), our attempt here is to uncover which of the two varieties lends itself more willingly to creating phrases that are handled like single units. The two pieces of software used to retrieve such units (n-grams and concgrams) are WordSmith Tools (Scott 2004), and ConcGram (Greaves 2005).