Conceptual Metaphor and Ideological Framing in Pakistani English News Media: A Corpus-Based Cognitive Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

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.