ABSTRACT
In Brunot’s famous phrase, ‘les mots sont les témoins de l’histoire’; the sources upon which a language draws, indigenous or external, the semantic fields which are subject to expansion or contraction, the twists and turns of an individual word’s semantic history, can all be given a socio-historical explanation. They reflect changes in the broad social structure of the nation, its changing relations with other countries and the cultural and economic preoccupations of its speakers.
