Constructing Ecological responsibility in Pakistani english newspaper coverage of extreme heat: A corpus-assisted Ecolinguistic discourse analysis

Abstract

One of the most damaging impacts of climate change is extreme heat, although there is not much information on the construction of ecological responsibility when covering such incidents in Pakistani news media. CAEDA (Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistic Discourse Analysis) is applied in this study to explore the representation of agency, responsibility and erasure in Dawn, Geo News and The Express Tribune. Specifically, a specialized corpus of 30 straight news articles (14,411 tokens; 11,757 running words) was constructed and analyzed using the Sketch Engine. Keyword and concordance analysis was combined with Halliday's Transitivity System and the notion of erasure put forward by Stibbe to explore the influence of grammatical choice on the ecological meaning making process. As a result, it can be observed that there are distinct patterns of ideology represented in the newspapers under discussion: Geo News highlights institutional responsibility, Dawn constructs individual responsibility through precautionary discourse, while The Express Tribune focuses on the human dimension and reduces the state agency. Mask and Trace emerged as the predominant modes of erasure, while no cases of Void could be found.