Indian Journal of Language and Linguistics

Deconstructing Power and Gender Dynamics: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Domestic and Sexual Abuse in ‘Criminal Justice 2: Behind Closed Doors’

Mamta, Om Prakash Prakash — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The dominant patriarchal standards continue to govern society, resulting in the subjugation of women through discriminatory practices, domestic abuse, and sexual assault. In numerous instances, women are not regarded as equal individuals, but rather as objects for the sake of male exploitation. Intimate partner violence is a reality which includes physical and sexual abuse along with the controlling behaviour. Media is a reflective tool for society. The portrayal of gender discrimination in the Indian web series encompasses several perspectives and conveys multiple meanings. In the web series ‘Criminal Justice 2: Behind Closed Doors’ we witness the sexual abuse of a woman in marital relations. Such issues remain hidden mostly because females do not reveal them due to the shame attached to it and suffer both mental and physical agony. The police, influenced by patriarchal norms, fail to investigate the underlying truth of crimes. The present study undertakes feminist critical discourse analysis of the sexual and mental abuse against women in the webseries ‘Criminal Justice: Behind Closed Doors-seasons 2’. The webseries has eight episodes from which dialogues manifesting power imbalance and gender stereotypes are randomly selected for the study. A total of fourteen dialogues were analysed carefully using feminist stylistics and Critical discourse analysis. Both the approaches help us understand and uncover the inherent sexism and power structures in the language and society. The textual analysis of the selected dialogues revealed the use of misogynist and sexist language by the male characters on the prosecution side.

Syntactic and Morphophonological Motivations for Compound Verb Formation in Nsukka Igbo within the OT Framework

Uzoagba, Ogechukwu Miracle, Nwaoke, Emmanuel Emeka — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This work critically appraises the roles of Optimality Theory (OT) in motivating morphophonological and syntactic elements in formation of compound verbs in Nsukka Igbo. OT addresses morpheme ordering through mappings between syntactic and morphological categories of languages. The OT phonological model has three levels: Input and GEN (generating candidates), CON (constraints set), and EVAL (evaluating optimality). GEN produces infinite candidates from any input, with no language-specific restrictions. The grammar (CONstraint ranking) determines the optimal candidate selected by EVAL. To analyze phonological outputs in Nsukka Igbo, the study focuses on Faithfulness, Markedness, and Alignment constraints. A native speaker (who relied on their intuitive knowledge) and a non-native collaborator drew data for the study. The OT methodology involves generating candidates, applying constraints, ranking them, and identifying optimal outputs. Constraints evaluate input-output similarity, dispreferred structures, and boundary correspondence, with tables showing candidate competition and violations. Compound verbs are analyzed using OT constraints like NoCoda, Dep-IO, NO HIATUS, and MAX-IO. The research discovers that OT can be used to analyse the syntactic structures of compound verbs in Nsukka Igbo. The findings of the research reveal that for a verb to qualify as a compound verb, the vowel of the added constituent must not obligatorily conform to the class of the vowels in the root verb.

Beyond Unprompted Worlds and Impromptu Words: A Sociolinguistic Exploration of Human-AI Interaction and Performativity

Mary Vidya Porselvi P — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The paper documents a sociolinguistic exploration of Human-AI interaction and performativity guided by the idea, words create worlds. Sociolinguistics is the scientific study of the relation between language and society. It acknowledges the fact that language is a social and cultural phenomenon. Central to the study is J. L Austin’s ‘Speech Acts’ theory that identifies three types of meaning: locutionary act (the literal utterance), illocutionary act (the speaker’s intent) and perlocutionary act (the effect on the listener). According to him, language is not only used for communication but also to perform actions. The paper explores different sociolinguistic dimensions of human-AI interaction through speech-acts performativity theory. It investigates how the locutionary and illocutionary dimensions of the human prompts shape the perlocutionary force of the resulting AI narratives. The study raises the research question, how do the locutionary and illocutionary acts within human prompts influence the structure and meaning of AI-generated narratives in relation to the individual, society, culture and environment? It positions AI responses not as mere data outputs, but as performative acts shaped by human intent, language, within socio-cultural-environmental contexts. The study also underscores the relation between Austin’s Speech-Acts theory with Jurgen Habermas’ communicative action theory. By examining these sociolinguistic dynamics through a novel conceptual framework titled AHIMSA- Authentic Human Intent Mapping of Speech-Acts, and supported by an innovative exploratory empirical study, the paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how human intentions embedded in speech acts influence AI-generated discourse, revealing the inherently social nature of human-machine communication. The findings underscore the importance of sociolinguistic awareness and the need for consciousness-raising in the design and interpretation of AI narratives. As a result, it recognizes the broader cultural, societal and environmental implications of language technologies in shaping meaning, identity, and action in this digital era.