ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the French situation in terms of hyperstyle, diglossia and the relative 'importance' of the diaphasic dimension of variation. In the 'standard plus regional dialects' situation exemplified by the United Kingdom, therefore, the available range of stylistic variation is further constrained by the individual's inability to command a wide range of social-regional varieties, which again argues against hyperstyle. Contemporary French, however, presents an enigma in that hyperstyle variation does seem to occur at a number of levels. French is unusually rich in pairs of lexical alternants, which appear to reflect the gulf between the standard and non-standard varieties of the language, wider perhaps than in other standardized western languages, and offer the linguist the opportunity to transfer the sociolinguistic variable concept to the lexical level. Full lexical items are problematical for quantitative analysis in that they occur less frequently than most phonological or grammatical elements, making it difficult to obtain representative numbers of tokens.
