Gender, Politeness and Pragmatic Particles in French (review)

Are women more polite or tentative than men in their use of language? This is what Kate Beeching tries to answer in her book, an updated version of her doctoral dissertation. By presenting both quantitative and qualitative analyses of some French pragmatic particles (PPs) as shown in a small corpus of transcribed spontaneous French, B aims to account for the intricate relationship between gender and politeness. Those interested in empirical approaches to gender and politeness in French interaction will find this book interesting and stimulating.

This book contains nine chapters. Ch. 1 presents a longer-than-usual introduction, where B reviews five views of politeness (the ‘social norm’ view, the ‘conversational-maxim’ view, the ‘face-saving’ view, the ‘conversational contract’ view, and the ‘modus operandi’ view), discussing previous research on gender and politeness. In Ch. 2, ‘Discourse markers and pragmatic particles’, B defines the characteristics of what she calls PPs, arguing for a maximalist description of the particles regarded ‘as a means of smoothing social relations but also as an overt flag of social status’ (25). In this chapter, B also surveys previous studies of markers of paraphrastic reformulation and their role in mediating negative and positive politeness. In Ch. 3, ‘Establishing and investigating a corpus of spoken French’, B introduces the data collection and transcription system for the study, highlighting the significance of a corpus-based approach to spoken French. In Ch. 4, by adopting the framework of conversation analysis and drawing on Robin Lakoff’s three rules of politeness (formality, deference, and camaraderie), B presents a qualitative analysis of the distributional frequency of PPs and the role they play in the mediation of politeness.

Chs. 5–8 focus on in-depth quantitative studies of the pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic characteristics and sociolinguistic stratification of four PPs: c’est-à-dire (que), enfin, hein, and quoi. In discussing the usage of hein, for instance, B points out that it can be classified as a hedging device mostly used by the least educated. B’s quantitative analysis shows that PPs do play a part in mediating politeness and that ‘spontaneous spoken French is structured along rule-governed lines’ (216). According to B, female speakers are more polite than males in the sense that they seem to be more skillful in the ‘usage of the PPs to structure discourse and to maintain contact with their interlocutor’ (vii). Finally, Ch. 9 summarizes the major findings and limitations of the study.

Overall, this is a fine book that, by giving a detailed account of some gender-asymmetrical PPs in spoken French, provides some new findings for the relationship between gender and politeness in interaction. The book is not perfect, of course. First, since the corpus B uses in her study ‘is composed of speech elicited by a non-native female interviewer’ (207), some readers may wonder about the reliability, validity, or naturalness of the data collected. Second, it should be noted that there is no necessary link between politeness and linguistic forms. Third, as can be seen from the definition given by the author (26), politeness for her is in essence a strategy. This conceptualization of politeness is actually incomplete, ignoring the notion that politeness should be regarded as a social practice. Last but not least, the topic of gender and politeness is a complex one and there is the implicit danger of stereotyping or oversimplification in the claim that women are necessarily more polite than men.