Framing ‘Development’ in Economic Discourse: An Ecolinguistic Perspective

Abstract

This research explores the discourse produced around the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) from an ecolinguistic perspective; examining how environment can be saved or degraded through the use of language. By analyzing documents taken from the CPEC's website, the study has identified and analyzed the framing of the construct of ‘Development’ by conducting a corpus analysis. Employing corpus-based critical discourse analysis, the research used Fairclough’s (2013) theoretical framework to find out different frames surrounding ‘Development’. The identified development frames are further divided into 14 frames by using Sen’s (2013) approach of sustainability at three levels such as economic sustainability, social sustainability and environmental sustainability. Sen’s approach helped to find out the Ecolinguistic perspective in terms of environmental frames triggered in the minds of people. The findings highlight 14 frames used in the portrayal of development within the CPEC context. The highest frequency is gained by the economic development frame with 425 concordance hits while lowest frequency is gained by the social frames constituting 86 concordance hits. The findings based on concordance analysis suggest that economic development frame is highly triggered by the discourse on the CPEC in the minds of people through infrastructure and industrial development.