Stories We Live By: Differential Narrative Construction of the 2022 Pakistan Floods in Pakistani and American Newspaper Discourse

Abstract

Environmental disasters become comprehensible through linguistic choices that shape public understanding and policy responses across geographical boundaries. This article examines how newspaper discourse from different cultural positions constructs the same environmental event through distinct narrative frameworks. Using Stibbe's (2021) ecolinguistic framework, we conduct a comparative textual analysis of coverage from Pakistan's Dawn and The Washington Post of the 2022 Pakistan floods, which affected over 33 million people and caused $30 billion in damages. While acknowledging the methodological constraints of analyzing two articles, we demonstrate how specific linguistic choices—across ideologies, framings, metaphors, evaluations, identity constructions, conviction markers, erasure patterns, and salience arrangements aggregate into coherent but divergent interpretive frameworks. Analysis reveals that Dawn constructs the floods as a manageable national crisis requiring governmental coordination and collective mobilization, employing institutional voices, financial precision, and forward-looking temporal structures. Conversely, The Washington Post constructs the floods as a humanitarian catastrophe overwhelming local capacity, employing individual testimony, sensory metaphors, and extended temporal uncertainty. These divergent constructions reflect distinct institutional positions, audience expectations, and epistemological frameworks that determine what aspects of disaster become linguistically visible while others remain obscured. The study confirms that linguistic analysis reveals the constructed nature of environmental narratives without claiming linguistic choices create different material realities. Instead, different linguistic resources selectively highlight certain disaster aspects while backgrounding others—an inevitable consequence of converting multidimensional catastrophe into narrative form. We conclude that understanding how language constructs environmental disaster across cultural contexts is essential for advancing climate justice and coordinated international disaster response, and we identify research directions for expanding this analysis through larger corpora, reception studies, and vernacular media examination.