Reviewed by Iris Levitis, University of California, Davis

This volume is a rare example of a successful attempt to combine structural, sentence-level analyses with socio-cultural issues both thoroughly and systematically. 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 excerpts from sixteen novels by eight authors (including Mongo Beti and Sembène Ousmane). 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 metropolitan France to the reinterpretations of the eight modern authors represented in his corpus. D examines hybrid sentences, in which French is combined with a local language. Illustrative hybrid sentences are given from two creoles: Noutchi, spoken in the Ivory Coast, and Camfranglais, spoken in Cameroon. The following sentence from Patrice Nganang’s Temps de Chien (345) is a characteristic hybrid sentence of Camfranglais: Et il avait raison, a me ben tchup. (Et il avait raison, c’est moi qui le dis.) ‘And he was right, I say’ (50). 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 use to introduce West African cultural terms into French, e.g. this sentence from Gabriel Kuitche Fonkou’s Moi Taximan (85): L’année entrait dans le « Ncoe Ngesan », le mois de la récolte du maïs ‘The year entered the “Ncoe Ngesan”, the month of harvesting maize’ (153). Ch. 4 commences with a definition and evaluation of the difficulties of translation in the course of which 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. Additionally, sociolinguistic information is encoded in the code-switching and can be lost in translation into a single language.

Ch. 5 addresses the influence of aspects of African sociology and culture on sentence structure: e.g. linguistic markers of politeness, using place-names to name characters, and gastronomic characteristics. Ch. 6 discusses five African sociocultural contributions to French and how they should be incorporated into the language.

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