Metalinguistic items and French Language Deconstruction in Literary Works

Abstract

Metalinguistic, defined as “relating the formal system of language to other cultural systems”, creates some linguistic void when African writers express themselves in French. Our study of two African authors of Francophone African origin reveals that. The two authors – Ahmadou Kourouma and Amadou Hampâté Bâ – Malinké and Fulani respectively, operate in both their mother tongue and their L2 (French) effectively. The emphasis on their effective operation in the two languages is the reason for their study. Some linguistic voids experienced by them are real. Hence, they embark on “graft” approach to substitute the void. Such approach exposes the structural deficiency of the French to accommodate the African thinking process or worldview. We intend to present some examples in this presentation and posit that the African syntactic structure carried into substituting linguistic void in French has peculiarities that call for alternative paradigm of analysis. A pseudo-pragmatics‟ approach has proved necessary in this presentation.