A more Pythonic way to iterate over a list with duplicate items
You could use enumerate to get the index. It makes the code both simpler and more efficient, as the linear search of index is avoided. I would also suggest unpacking t to (word, tag) to improve readability.

for ndx, (word, tag) in enumerate(wsj_list):
    if word in wordlist and tag == 'VN':
        print wsj[ndx-1:ndx+1], ndx