Gender-based differences on Spanish conversational exchanges: The role of the follow-up move

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse Spanish conversational structure, more concretely, to investigate in depth the role of the third move, or follow-up, outside classroom discourse. Since first introduced by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975), the follow-up move has attracted a great deal of attention, as proved by numerous studies. However, these studies have mostly focused on English while Spanish has been neglected. The present study intends to fill in this gap by analysing a corpus of 50 conversational exchanges in Peninsular Spanish. The analysis is qualitative and based on Tsui’s (1994) conversational framework, which has proved methodologically useful. As results will show, the presence or absence of the third move in Spanish conversations seems to rely heavily on a gender-based distinction.