Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T20:28:14.320Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Kate Beeching, Gender, politeness and pragmatic particles in French. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp viii, 246. Hb.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2005

Fabienne H. Baider
Fabienne H. Baider
Affiliation:
French, University of Cyprus, Cyprus, 1678, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

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.

Type
Book Review
Information
Language in Society , Volume 34 , Issue 5 , November 2005 , pp. 812 - 816
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

FRANTEXT (2002). Analyse et traitement informatique de la langue française, at www.atilf.fr.
Holmes, Janet (1994). Women, men and politeness. London: Longman.
Lakoff, Robin (1975). Language and woman's place. New York: Harper & Row.
Pillon, Agnesa (1987). Le Sexe du locuteur est-il un facteur de variation linguistique? Revue critique, La Linguistique, 23:35–48.Google Scholar
Pillon, Agnesa (1992). Males' and females' conversational behavior in cross-sex dyads: From gender differences to gender similarities. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 21(3):147–172.Google Scholar
Trésor de La Langue Française informatisé (2002). Analyse et traitement informatique de la langue française. At www.atilf.fr
Wouk, Fay (2002). Review of Kate Beeching 2002, Gender, politeness and pragmatic particles in French, electronic document at http://www.linguistlist.org