Abstract:
Over the recent decades, the role of gender in discourse has been an intriguing arena of investigation in sociolinguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis. Phonological, grammatical and semantic features have been pointed out that male and female discourse can be identified by a number of researchers. Significant differences in English language between male and female appear on grammatical and syntactical level, where men’s discourse is asserted to be more direct and less hedged than women’s discourse (Key, 1975). It is argued that women use features such as reduplicated forms, intensifiers, modal constructions and tag questions more regularly than men. While using vocabulary, women are asserted to employ different emotionally colored and vigorous adjectives, whilst men use forms that highlight masculinity, for instance barbed, bristly, and lusty, etc. The present study seeks to propose and assess parameters for investigating narrative discourse difference in cross-gender interactions between Indian male/female speakers. The parameter focused are the discourse cohesion under macro-proposition, presence or absence of transitional elements, total number of words and total time taken under micro-proposition of oral narrative discourse on a topic “profession”. The quantitative approach of T-unit analysis was used to extract these parameters of narrative discourse. The data was statistically analyzed and results indicated no significant difference between the male and female participants’ productivity and efficiency of discourse coherence. But there exist an increased word counts and duration taken to complete the narrative discourse by female participants compared to male participants. This could be because of the poor working memory capacity in females, requiring more words and time to narrate on a topic compared to male participants.