Can rules of construction of lexems (RCL) disappear in diachrony?

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• French language
• label
• syntactical recategorization
• availability
• diachrony
• derivational pattern
• construction of lexems
• rule