Crime narratives often reflect underlying power dynamics, with marginalised groups, particularly women and individuals with disabilities, frequently portrayed as voiceless or vulnerable. These depictions reinforce systemic injustices and cultural perceptions that can be critically examined through the intersection of disability, gender, and crime. Drawing on Jack A. Nelson’s stereotype theory and a disability studies methodology, this paper analyses the Malayalam courtroom drama Neru (The Truth, 2023), focusing on its portrayal of disability within a legal and social context. The film centres on Sara Muhammed, a visually impaired sculptor and survivor of sexual assault, whose pursuit of justice, supported by public prosecutor Vijayamohan, reveals both entrenched ableist attitudes and moments of narrative empowerment. By positioning a disabled woman at the centre of a judicial narrative, Neru both reflects and challenges dominant media stereotypes outlined by Nelson, including the tropes of the pitiable victim, the burden, and the supercrip. Sara’s character oscillates between being framed as a tragic figure and a resilient agent of change, thereby complicating traditional portrayals of disability in Indian cinema. Through close analysis of specific scenes and dialogues, this paper highlights how Neru critiques institutional and cultural ableism, especially in the context of credibility, trauma, and justice for disabled women. This paper places Neru within the broader context of Malayalam cinematic traditions, demonstrating how it addresses systemic inequities and stereotypes about disability. As such, Neru offers a meaningful intervention in contemporary criminal storytelling, redefining how disability, gender, and justice intersect in Indian cinema and echoing Nelson’s call for more inclusive and authentic media representations.

National anthems are solemn patriotic songs that are officially adopted by countries as the expression of their national identity which are rendered during special or official events. There are robust previous researches on the thematic and stylistics analysis of the just abandoned Nigerian national anthem without a comprehensive Linguistic and functional analysis of the old-new anthem. Therefore, this focus of this study is to investigate and present the functional analysis of the old-new anthem of Nigeria with a view to studying its experiential function and implications. Halliday’s Functional Grammar (FG) was adopted as framework for this study. Specifically, the theory of experiential metafunction: processes and transitivity. The data for this study is taken from the newly re-introduced Nigerian national anthem. Six process types were identified in the anthem: material, relational, mental, verbal, behavioral and existential processes. The findings of this work points to a predominant use of material processes to indicate the expected measures to be taken by citizens of Nigeria to strengthen the development and progress of their nation. Other process types are used sparingly to put in place relationships, and present the nation as important entity. This paper infers that the establishment of national unity is better portrayed through the functional analysis of the process types in the Nigeria Old-new national anthem because the linguistic tool of transitivity is that language form is not coincidental, but performs a communicative function.

The present study provides a qualitative and quantitative account of the rhetorical use of metadiscourse markers in Chomsky’s On Nature and Language, claiming that interaction is an essential component of persuasion in social fields in general and in linguistic discourse in particular. Persuasion, therefore, relies on effective argument and writer-reader interaction as writers are uncertain when dealing with human subjects and data, on one hand, and unable to draw on empirical demonstration or trusted quantitative methods (Hyland, 2000). As a result, writers use language to engage their readers by positioning, persuading and including them as discourse participants (Hyland, 2019). Chomsky’s linguistic discourse received several studies, however, writer-reader interaction as an integral component of the construction and attainment of ethos was marginalized and overlooked. Accordingly, the study hypothesizes that metadiscourse plays an essential role in Chomsky’s persuasive discourse. Moreover, the study addresses the question of how metadiscourse is deployed to engage and persuade the reader, on one hand, and to create a credible persona, on the other hand. The study identified 4,724 instances of metadiscourse in a corpus of 38,183 words. This is a frequency of one every 8 words. It also shows that instances of interactional metadiscourse are significantly greater than interactive ones, and the most frequent categories are engagement markers (35.9), hedges (27.1), transitions (18.7) and boosters (16.1).