Pragma-Semiotic Study of Sustainability Narratives in Western and Arab Selected Media

This study examines how environmental sustainability narratives are pragma-semiotically constructed in Western and Arab digital media, where meaning is built through the interaction of image and language. Although environmental facts are universal, their persuasive framing is culturally specific, and prior research has treated the textual and visual dimensions of environmental discourse separately, leaving a gap in integrated comparative accounts. The study therefore pursues five objectives: identifying the semiotic and visual strategies of environmental media posts; investigating their persuasive pragmatic strategies; analysing how environmental problems are ideologically framed; examining how image and text jointly construct sustainability messages; and identifying the similarities and differences between the two discourses, particularly in individualistic and collectivistic orientations. To this end, it develops an eclectic model, situated within Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies, that operates on three levels: semiotic, based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) visual grammar; pragmatic, based on Searle’s (1969) assertive and directive speech acts and Cap’s (2013) proximisation theory; and framing, based on Entman’s (1993) four framing functions, through which each sample’s dominant Core Green Frame is identified. The model is applied to a purposive corpus of 20 multimodal samples (ten Western and ten Arab) drawn from institutional and news platforms, and the qualitative analysis is supported by descriptive frequency analysis. Findings show that Western discourse leans towards individualism and activism and makes greater use of demand images, whereas Arab discourse leans towards collectivism, state mediation, and infrastructural imagery; proximisation strategies occur in both corpora but are realised differently.