ABSTRACT
External borrowing is the kind of lexical renewal of which speakers are most aware, and which attracts most public comment. Nevertheless, the most important source of new words in French has always been the exploitation of the internal lexical resources of the language: the combining and recombining of existing lexical elements. Over the centuries, families of words, or lexical paradigms based on a common root, have been elaborated: symbole, symbolique, symboliser, symboliquement, symboliste…discret, indiscret, discrètement, discrétion…histoire, préhistoire, historien, historique, historiquement…penser, repenser, impensable, pensée, penseur… Half an hour spent with a dictionary-especially one like the Dictionnaire du français contemporain, organised by lexical paradigm-will demonstrate the wide variety of affixes (either prefixes, added before the root, or suffixes, added after it), which are available to the language.
