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.

The book is organized into nine chapters, of which the first three treat preliminaries. The following five chapters present the study. The ninth and last summarizes the findings.

Chap. 1 provides a thorough background to the study of politeness in relation to gender. Having justified the link her study presupposes among the use of pragmatic particles (PP), the phenomenon of tentativeness, and the concept of politeness, Beeching explains the choice of the four PPs under review because they represent “a balanced mechanism” to understand repair strategies on one hand (c'est-à-dire and enfin) and face-saving strategies on the other (hein and quoi). Major approaches to politeness are then reviewed: the social norm view, the face-saving view (used in most chapters), and Kerbrat Orecchioni's face-enhancing act, among others. After giving her definition of politeness (“the manner in which human beings attempt to achieve sociability in everyday interactions”), Beeching explains why the measurement of politeness will be based on Lakoff's Rules of Politeness, and how these rules are enacted through selection among the four chosen PPs. Epistemic modality and tag questions are then discussed in detail in relation to usage differences by gender. The chapter ends with a review of French research on the topic of power, status, and language, concluding that most studies agree that women are more polite than men.

Chap. 2 explores the nature of discourse markers and pragmatic particles. The author reviews the many attempts to define these particles and settles for a definition based on nine characteristics: PPs are metalinguistic, multifunctional, a feature of spoken and informal discourse, very frequent, short, not found in utterance-initial position, and do not have a propositional content but have a pragmatic function. There follows a discussion of methodological issues and of the adequate level of detail in description; this allows Beeching to explain her own methodology. The chapter ends with a description of studies that focus on the functions of PPs as markers of reformulation in relation to gender differences and politeness strategies.

Chap. 3 starts with a review of the available spoken French corpora, noting the difficulty in accessing such corpora. Most of the chapter presents the corpus: the collection of data and its orthographic transcription. The corpus is then described as balanced because it contains an equal quantity of words that has been produced by each gender, three age groups and three levels of education are represented, and a wide range of locations in France has been investigated. For these reasons, the data can provide a reasonable basis for drawing sound conclusions on the relationships among sociological variables (gender, age, sex), the use of the PPs, and politeness.

With chap. 4 the analysis of the corpus as such starts. The chapter reviews the qualitative analysis, promising “an in-depth analysis of the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors which pertain in the interviews” (p. 79). The author makes use of Lakoff's Rules of Politeness – Formality (keep aloof), Deference (give options), and Camaraderie (show sympathy) – in an attempt to classify the interviews according to their style and to determine whether there is a link between type of speaker, topic, and the presence of PPs. Some general conclusions are drawn, among others, an avoidance of PPs when speech is “highly monitored” has been noted; variation in the usage of PPs can be explained by the different faces adopted by the speaker (the more rapport is wanted, the more PPs will be in use); and the class variable may explain the presence of certain PPs, such as hein and quoi for working-class speakers.

Chaps. 5–8 investigate the functioning of each particle, respectively c'est-à-dire, enfin, hein, and quoi. Each chapter combines quantitative and qualitative approaches. They are roughly divided into four parts: a short review of the literature on each speech particle; an attempt to define the pragmatic, semantic and syntactic properties of each particle; a hypothesis regarding the social stratification of the PP; and a conclusion. Within each chapter, an example is allocated on an instance-by-instance basis to a particular function group for each particle, in order adequately to describe each feature employed. Graphs and tables summarize the distribution of each PP according to each variable.

In chap. 5, data confirm the functions of c'est-à-dire as identified in dictionaries. As a discourse marker, it flags an upcoming reformulation (explanation, correction, detailing, specification, exemplification) of a previously given information. As a hedging expression, in some exceptional cases it attenuates the force of a contradiction or a refusal. Whether for the distribution or for the functions, no striking gender asymmetry is identified, even though women may tend to use it more as a request for information and middle-aged women tend to avoid this particle entirely. In conclusion, c'est-à-dire seems to be a marker of educated speech, although younger speakers tend to use it more often.

In chap. 6 the study of the PP enfin shows that, although it has ten different functions, it is used mainly as a corrective (and as a self-corrective), which restricts the proposition or downplays an assertion; it then serves to protect the speaker's face. Although no social variable (age, sex, or education) seems to play a significant statistical role, men and women differ in the way they use this PP: Men seem to use it to introduce correction, while women use it more as a discourse marker with its literal meaning ‘last’. These findings would, according to the author, weaken Lakoff's (1975) claim that women are more hesitant in their speech. However, they would support Chambers's (1995) claim that women have a natural ability, superior to that of men, to structure their discourse.

According to the data presented in chap. 7, men and women use the PP hein to the same extent, whether as a discourse marker or as an emphatic particle. Turn length seems to be a significant variable for use as a discourse marker. However, within a subset of the data, men seem to privilege its hyperbolic-pragmatic function; women tend to use hein more as a discursive marker. According to the author, these results would mean that women are more polite because they more often adopt structured speech. Men, in contrast, are analyzed as less polite because the emphatic usage “could be considered to be distancing or adversarial.”

Finally, in chap. 8, quoi, as utterance terminator, is said to be used as a self-corrective particle and as an indicator of vagueness or uncertainty concerning the adequacy of the information. The usage of quoi shows some discrepancies: Its use rises among the middle-aged group (the age of interviewer being mentioned as a possible explanation for a low rate among the younger group) and among the least educated male speakers (perhaps because of covert prestige or as a face-saving strategy). The hypercorrection phenomenon may explain the lower usage among middle-class women than among upper-class women.

In chap. 9, Beeching summarizes the findings of each chapter and concludes that Lakoff's (1975) assertions concerning the non-tentative nature of men's speech are not confirmed. She proceeds to rely on the idea that the gender asymmetrical usages she noted would reflect “biological differences and aptitudes.”

This revised and abridged version of Beeching's doctoral dissertation is unique in its focus on the usage of pragmatic particles in relation to gender and politeness in spoken French. This study should then break new ground. Does it fulfil its promise?

The danger in Beeching's gambit in appealing to Lakoff's 1975 book, with all its defects, as the principal standard against which the present study is measured has been described elsewhere (Wouk 2002). More recent works on gender and politeness have shown that men and women “do” politeness differently within the same culture (see Holmes 1994) and that tentativeness may not be a good measurement for politeness.

Furthermore, pragmatic particles such as hein and quoi are also frequently linked with emotions. This begs the question whether data obtained in interviews led by an anglophone, unknown to the speakers and not necessarily of the same age group as the interviewee, are likely to allow an accurate description of the PPs under review.

As for the results, Pillon 1987, 1992 came ten years earlier to the same data used by Beeching; her study of conversational behaviors of males and females in spoken French showed that linguistic behaviors differed only slightly. More important, although women appear to have a more hypercorrective attitude toward language, a fact also recorded in Beeching's data, the preference for standard linguistic forms characterizes the speech of all individuals aspiring to rise in the social hierarchy. Therefore, gender does not seem to be the factor – social position does.

Finally, this book is marred by some editorial errors (a nonexistent chapter 10 is mentioned in the conclusion) as well as misleading statements (FRANTEXT is presented as a database containing literary texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the texts in fact range from the sixteenth century on). To point out such infelicities may seem like nit-picking; but trivial or not, these inaccuracies in the presentation of information could undermine the book's value as a reliable reference source.

However, this book will be useful for researchers and teachers in French sociolinguistics, not only because of the scarcity of material investigating correlations among sex, age, education, and linguistic features in contemporary French, but also because of the thorough review of the literature on gender and the French language. In fact, the author rather dismissively notes that most previous studies on gender and the French language are “most introspective, anecdotal or philosophical/feminist in tenor.” Actually, some linguists, feminist or not, may be surprised at the essentialist position adopted by Beeching in explaining male and female discourse preferences by possibly biological features: Let's not forget that “on ne naît pas femme, on le devient.”