Framing Sustainability across Languages: A Corpus-Assisted Metaphor Study of British and Italian Newspaper Discourse

This study investigates the metaphorical framings of sustainability in British and Italian newspaper discourse through a comparable bilingual corpus analysis. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004), and the scenario-based approach (Musolff, 2006, 2016b), the analysis examines a corpus of 1,664,644 tokens compiled from eight national outlets: Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, Il Sole 24 Ore, La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, and Il Giornale. Metaphorical expressions were identified within concordances for sustainab- and sostenib- using an adapted version of MIPVU (Pragglejaz Group, 2007; Steen et al., 2010), and classified into source domains and scenarios. The analysis identified 1,976 metaphorical expressions across sixteen source domains. JOURNEY proved by far the most frequent, accounting for over a third of all instances, followed by OBJECT AND SUBSTANCE, COMPETITION, PHYSICAL FORCE, BUILDING, WAR, and PERCEPTION, alongside nine minor domains. The scenario-based analysis revealed that broad domains are elaborated into distinct discursive narratives with specific evaluative and ideological implications. The predominant scenarios construct sustainability as a gradual, forward-directed process compatible with continued economic growth, while narratives of systemic transformation remain largely absent. Creative metaphorical elaborations, though a minority, were employed to challenge dominant assumptions, confirming the capacity of figurative language to both reproduce and contest ideological positions. The study contributes to cross-linguistic metaphor research by providing empirical evidence for shared conceptual patterns and language-specific variation, and reinforces the analytical value of the scenario-based approach as an intermediate level of analysis between broad domains and individual expressions.