Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 1999
The first goal of this article is to present a description of the linguistic features that distinguish the genderlects of Russian. Although there exist some data on interruptions and other kinds of gender-specific discourse behavior in Russian, they are not discussed here, because the variables that govern gender differences in linguistic behavior are too numerous and inconclusive, and Russian data that bear on such behavior remain at this point too meager. Rather, what is discussed here are the structural features of Russian genderlects. This focus leads to a second goal, a theoretical one: to explore how genderlect phenomena can be explained in the Transactional Discourse Model (TDM), a broadly generative, pragmatically based discourse model that is sensitive to the factors that control the occurrence of gender-specific features in speech.