NARRATIVE ANALYSIS: GENDER DIFFERENCES IN PERSONAL REGRET EXPERIENCES

Back to Page Authors: Esra Küçüksakarya, Ruhan Güçlü

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Keywords: discourse analysis, gender, narrative structure, personal experiences

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Abstract: Narrative as a text-type has been the subject of research in a variety of linguistic fields such as sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics. They are the principal means of encoding and interpreting personal experiences. These individual experiences can be evaluated and interpreted with a narrative analysis. The present study is an attempt to investigate the regret narratives of the Turkish University students regarding their personal experiences and to evaluate these narratives in terms of gender. To achieve this, 90 narratives drawn from the Turkish University students’ written texts are analyzed within the framework of Labov’s narrative components, which are categorized as abstract, orientation, complicating actions, coda, evaluation and result or resolution. In addition to the examination of these categories in terms of their existence in the text, their organizational patterns are also compared and contrasted with respect to the gender of the participants. The evaluation of the narratives is expected to illustrate that the regret narratives of Turkish University students exhibit some common components and patterns in regard to their gender. Studying regrets, as narrative forms would allow us to have deeper understanding of Turkish regret narrative structures, the organizational patterns and gender related differences.

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