Ecolinguistic Analysis of Climate Discourse in the Post-2022-Flood Pakistani English Press

Abstract

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.