"Phrase française et francographie africaine (De l’influence de la socioculture)"

Dassi, M.
2008
Munich: LINCOM Europa. Pp. 425.

In this book (the third in the ‘LINCOM Studies in French Linguistics’ series) M. Dassi adopts a discourse analysis approach to explore the French sentence as it has evolved in literature emerging from West Africa. D's corpus consists of sixteen novels by eight authors (including Mongo Beti and Sembène Ousmane) from which the author draws excerpts as data. The result is six thoughtful chapters on the morphological, phonological, and syntactic aspects of the literature of Francophone West Africa.

In Ch. 1 D summarizes efforts to define the sentence from philosophic attempts originating in continental France, to the reinterpretations of the eight modern authors represented in his corpus. D examines hybrid sentences which he defines by their combination of French with the local language. Illustrative hybrid sentences are given. These two creoles are Noutchi - spoken in the Ivory Coast - and Camfranglais - spoken in Cameroon. The example in 1 from Temps de Chien is a characteristic hybrid sentence of Camfranglais:

(1) “Et il avait raison, a me ben tchup. TDC, 345.

(Et il avait raison, c’est moi qui le dis)” (59).

And he was right, I say.

Ch. 2 introduces African writers and the different linguistic methods they have employed in their writing. The chapter concludes with a description of the open syntactic classes and examples of locally derived nouns, adjectives, and verbs incorporated by West African French.

In Ch. 3, D defines glosses or annotations and explores their utility when West African cultural terms are borrowed into French. An example from Moi Taximan is given below,

(2) “L’année entrait dans le «Ncoe Ngesan», le mois de la récolte du maïs. MTM.85”
(p. 153).

The year entered in the "Ncoe Ngesan," the month of harvesting maize.

These cultural terms are thus inserted into French texts and enrich the French language. Ch. 4 commences with a definition and evaluation of the difficulties of translation. D provides an overview of translation theory and methodology. As an example, a portion of text is examined in French and in the original language, demonstrating that the original requires fewer phonetic units and is more concise than the translation. Also, sociolinguistic information is encoded in the code-switching and can be lost in translation into any single language.

Ch. 5 directly addresses how sentence structure is influenced by aspects of African sociology and culture. Among the many aspects which D focuses on are the linguistic markers of politeness, and the naming of characters using place-name, and gastronomic characteristics. Ch. 6 provides five points concerning the importance of African sociocultural contributions to French and how these should be incorporated into the language.

This is an excellent contribution to the study of language in the sociocultural milieu of West Africa. It propones a reevaluation of French as an evolving language. It should be read by anyone interested in sociolinguistics, African linguistics and literature, Camfranglais, Noutchi, or the French language.

Book Notice to appear in Language in 2010.