An Ecolinguistic Analysis of Discursive Strategies in Dawn’s 2025 Flood Coverage: A Mixed-Method Study

Abstract

One of the greatest challenges of the 21st century is the significant increase in environmental issues in Pakistan, necessitating a critical examination of how elite media sources construct and maintain dominant societal narratives concerning natural resource management, economic development, and ecological integrity. This mixed-methods study employs an ecolinguistic discourse analysis (EDA) to critically analyse the representation of social, environmental, and ecological issues in Dawn, Pakistan's primary and most influential English-language newspaper, in the context of the 2025 flood.  The core aim of the study is to identify and critique the fundamental “stories we live by”, the underlying and unquestioned narratives that are perpetuated and embedded in the media discourse. The research analyses purposive Dawn news articles published over three months, between September and November. Moreover, it employs a unifying mixed-method approach, the quantitative approach to outline frequencies and dominant linguistic features in the text, and the qualitative component of the study performs an in-depth analysis guided by the analytical tools of Stibbe’s (2015) framework. The current research identifies specific language patterns that either reinforce or resist ecocentric or Eco-destructive narratives within Dawn Newspapers' public discourse by methodically combining quantitative rigour and qualitative depth. Furthermore, the analysis procedure in the present study is critically guided by an explicit normative framework of ecosophy, which serves as a tool to analyse media discourses that either strengthen or weaken the life-sustaining relationship between other species, human societies, and the ecosystem. Therefore, the study’s findings offer a critique of the media’s significant influence on public consciousness grounded in ecological principles, making a valuable theoretical contribution in ecolinguistic discourse analysis (EDA).