Lexical Choices and Geopolitical Crisis: A Corpus-based Eco-Linguistic Analysis of Pakistani English Newspapers’ Editorials

Abstract

This study aims to examine how geopolitical crisis are linguistically constructed and ecologically erased in Pakistani English news editorials, with a specific focus on climate change discourse during the April-June 2025 Indo-Pakistani conflict, delimited to three leading English-language newspapers: Dawn, The Express Tribune and The News International. Language does not merely define the world; instead, it constructs, legitimizes, and naturalizes certain ways of seeing it. Geopolitical crisis, particularly in South Asia, play a crucial role in determining official responses in shaping media discourse in ways that frequently subordinate ecological concerns to anthropocentric political agendas. Despite the growing urgency of climate change as a 21st-century challenge in countries like Pakistan, the intersection of geopolitical crisis discourse and Eco-linguistic analysis remains a critically understudied domain in both linguistic and environmental communication scholarship. This study employed a mixed-method, corpus-based Eco-linguistic design guided by Stibbe’s (2015) ‘Stories we live by” framework. The purposively compiled corpus of approximately 110 articles and 36,520 tagged tokens were drawn. Quantitative analysis was conducted AntConc for frequency, collocation, and concordance analysis while the USAS semantic tagger was applied to identify ecologically relevant lexical domain. Qualitative discourse analysis was subsequently performed on the corpus to examine seven Eco-linguistic stories. The study identified the geopolitical semantic priorities and features of climate change in Pakistani media discourse from the perspective of Eco-linguistic analysis, which helps in corpus-assisted climate change, eco-linguistics, and also in critical discourse analysis. Findings of this research practically give directions to policymakers, educators, and journalists to produce a precise, approachable, and engaging reporting and stretches an actionable-responses for refining climate literacy.