Analysing Cohesive Devices in Igbo Oral Narrative Performance: A Comparative Study of Male and Female Storytellers

This study analyses cohesive devices in Igbo oral narrative performance, comparing their frequency, typology, and functional deployment between male and female storytellers across two communities in Imo State, South East Nigeria. While cohesion in written text has attracted significant attention in Igbo linguistic research, oral narrative cohesion as a performance-conditioned textual phenomenon remains underexplored, and gender as a variable in oral narrative style has been even less systematically studied. The research records and transcribes forty oral narrative performances, twenty by male and twenty by female storytellers, selected across a range of narrative genres including folktales, personal experience narratives, and community historical accounts. Cohesive analysis applies Halliday and Hasan's cohesion framework adapted for spoken performance contexts, supplementing standard categories with oral-specific cohesion types including call-and-response cohesion, parallelistic repetition, and deictic anchoring to physical performance space. Findings reveal significant gender-conditioned differences in cohesive strategy preference: female storytellers deploy lexical cohesion and parallelistic repetition significantly more frequently than male storytellers, while male storytellers show higher rates of conjunction use and explicit discourse connectives. Both gender groups rely heavily on reference cohesion as the primary narrative thread management strategy. The study contributes to Igbo oral linguistics and narrative gender studies. Keywords: Igbo oral narrative, cohesive devices, gender, performance, storytelling.