This study investigates how climate change is linguistically constructed in the Pakistani English-language press during the three years following the catastrophic 2022 floods, a period of heightened editorial attention to climate issues. Situated within an interpretivist paradigm, the study integrates two frameworks: Stibbe's (2015, 2021) ecolinguistic model of the “stories we live by,” coded through six categories — framing, metaphor, identity, conviction, salience, and erasure — and Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics, specifically transitivity analysis, coding clauses for process type, Actor, and Goal to reveal how agency and responsibility are grammatically distributed. The population comprises approximately five hundred (N ≈ 500) climate-related editorials published in Dawn, The News International, and The Express Tribune between January 2023 and December 2025. A stratified purposive sample of ninety (n = 90) editorials was drawn, thirty (n = 30) from each outlet, retrieved from official online archives via climate-related keyword searches and compiled into a corpus analysed with AntConc (Version 4.2.0) for frequency, keyword, and collocational patterning, followed by qualitative ecolinguistic and transitivity coding. Findings indicate that Pakistani editorials favour material processes and active agency, foreground governance and financial accountability, and privilege institutional over community-centred perspectives, with erasure and salience patterns varying across outlets.
Muhammad Sheraz Anwar, D. Anwar, Rai Muhammad Aon Raza et al.· Journal of Arts and Linguist...· 0 citations
This study employs a mixed-methods design to investigate how conceptual metaphors function as devices of ideological framing in Pakistani English-language newspapers. The qualitative strand is grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and Charteris-Black's (2004) Critical Metaphor Analysis, integrated with Entman's (1993) framing theory, to interpret how source domains such as War, Journey, Disease, and Natural Disaster are mapped onto target domains of politics, economy, and security to naturalize particular worldviews; the quantitative strand converts identified metaphors into frequency counts, percentages, and collocation (MI) scores, tested for cross-newspaper association using chi-square analysis. The study addresses the scarcity of mixed-methods, corpus-based cognitive-pragmatic research on English print journalism within Pakistan's multilingual media landscape. Data were drawn from a purpose-built corpus of opinion editorials collected from five leading Pakistani English newspapers — Dawn, The News International, The Express Tribune, Pakistan Today, and Business Recorder — published between January and December 2025, drawn from an estimated population of 1,800 editorials. A purposive sample of 150 editorials (30 per newspaper), totaling approximately 120,000 words, was analyzed using AntConc for concordance, collocation, and frequency analysis, following Charteris-Black's three-stage identification–interpretation–explanation procedure. Findings reveal a statistically and qualitatively dominant reliance on War and economy-as-Patient metaphors, which construct crises as adversarial and precarious, reinforcing elite-centred and nationalistic ideological positioning across outlets. The study contributes a replicable mixed-methods framework for analyzing metaphor and ideology in South Asian print media.
Muhammad Shahrugh Bukhari, M. Siddique, Rai Muhammad Aon Raza et al.· Journal of Arts and Linguist...· 0 citations