ABSTRACT
In our last chapter we discussed the ‘elaboration of function’ which occurred in French in the later Middle Ages when the language took over the H functions previously carried out by Latin. The process of ‘elaboration’ did not of course stop then, for it is an on-going one: since the sixteenth century the lexicon has had to expand to cope with the innumerable social, economic and technological changes involved in France’s transition from being a simple agricultural economy to an advanced industrial one (e.g. railways, aviation, computing); new varieties of French have been generated over and above traditional writing and interpersonal speech, by the development of new modes of communication like the telegraph, the telephone, radio and television, etc. The ideal goal of the process of ‘elaboration’ has been summed up as the achievement of ‘maximal variation in function’ (see Haugen 1966: 107).
