“War on Terror” – An Intentional Choice of Words? A Corpus Analysis of war on and war against

On 11 September 2001, President George W Bush declared a ‘war against terrorism’ but the official response to the attacks on America soon became known as the ‘war on terror’. The main aim of this paper is to report the findings of a corpus study designed to assess whether war on and war against are genuinely interchangeable. The findings show that war on is predominantly used for metaphorical wars, which begs the question as to why the White House should choose a metaphor for a campaign that was clearly going to involve military action. The answer is somewhat disquieting. The second aim is to examine how the German-speaking press renders war on terror and the reasons determining that lexical choice.