Based on D. Kastovsky's distinction (1986) between labels on the one hand, and, on the other hand, syntactical recategorization, the paper hypothesizes that labels (example of French collective nouns in -age) can disappear in diachrony, while recategorized nouns (example of deverbative nouns in -ance) are subject to availability variations in diachrony, but they are conserved in the language.