Composition nominale et enjeux d’écriture en francographie afriçaine. Une lecture fondée sur les romans d’Ahmadou Kourouma, Patrice Nganang et Gilbert Doho

Abstract

This study focuses on the nominal composition and its issues in the African text of French expression. The notion of nominal composition attracts the attention of researchers because of its complexity and the difficulty in proposing single definition for it. At the end of the reading of our corpus, we were able to observe two anomalies: a morphological anomaly in that the selected texts display compound nouns whose spelling, presenting a deviation from the norm, suggests their unusual character and a semantic anomaly. These anomalies arise from the freedom that the authors give themselves in the construction of the latter. Hence the problem of the morphosemantic acclimatization of compound nouns that emerges there. This scientific problem allowed us to ask the question of to what extent nominal composition is part of a dynamic process of meaning construction. Hence the general hypothesis formulated for this purpose: nominal composition participates in the expression of writing aims. We have associated three subsidiary hypotheses with the general hypothesis: 1) the nominal composition is influenced by the writing freedoms of the writer, 2) the nominal composition contributes to the expression of linguistic realism, 3) the nominal composition is dependent on the author’s universe of belief. To verify these hypotheses, we chose as a methodological approach the grammar of meaning and expression of Patrick Charaudeau coupled with the cognitive grammar of Ronald Langacker while putting forward a semasiological approach. It turns out that Ahmadou Kourouma, Patrice Nganang and Gilbert Doho use nominal composition as a means of expressing their vision of the world to which they assign several issues. Concretely, it is an element which structures the meaning of the text in that beyond being a matter of lexical creativity, it is for these African authors a means of expression, used for playful purposes: playful, realistic and identity.