Review of Gender, Politeness and Pragmatics in French (K. Beeching, John Benjamins Press, 2000)

Abstract

Kate Beeching's stated purpose is to investigate to what degree men and women differ in the way they render utterances more polite in contemporary spoken French, by means of an in-depth study of the functions and the distributional frequency of four pragmatic particles: c'est-à-dire, enfin, hein, and quoi. The analysis is anchored within Robin Lakoff's theory of politeness as described in Language and woman's place. On balance, and even though the author herself emphasizes the limitations of her corpus and framework, Beeching should be given credit for having put together a much-needed pragmatic study on gender and the French language. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]