Abstract: A long-term American-Bulgarian research was done in concern with the terror act on the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, DC. It was a psycholinguistic study of how 270 editorials from five different newspapers sought to make sense of an initially incomprehensible set of events. These newspapers were the American New York Times and Washington Post, the Bulgarian Sega, the Russian Izvestia, and the English Times. The meaning of possessions and, ultimately, of time and the transitoriness of things, is very different in Western and Eastern European cultures. That was the reason five and ten years later – the reflection and the meaning of this American tragedy for the world history to be studied again as it was reflected in the print mass media of East-West cultures. Some of the linguistic results of this research are discussed in this article.
Keywords: event meanings; mass media reflections; terrorist acts; historical references; framing terrorism; breaking news.
Rhetoric and Communications E-journal, Issue 4, April 2012, http://rhetoric.bg/, ISSN 1314-4464