摘要：Starting from various theoretical positions in regard to discourse analysis, language andgender, the paper attempts to examine two samples of all-female and all-male conversationbetween friends extracted from the TV series Coupling. It represents a small scale studywhich aims at comparing male and female conversational styles against different criteriaproposed by various authors – deficiency, dominance, powerful or powerless language, powerand solidarity, competitiveness, cooperativeness, etc. The analysis leads us towardsconcluding that it is almost impossible to draw a clear-cut border between male and femaletalk, as far as our corpus is concerned and this is due to the fact that conversation featurescharacteristic of either of the genders seem to overlap
