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.