Doris Gerland - Diachronic perspectives on functional nouns in French

French is one of the best documented European languages and offers as such the possibility to investigate the development of functional nouns and their integration into grammar and lexicon.
   The diachronic perspective on this type of nouns provides evidence for the hypothesis that most of them emerged from kinaesthetic frames. Special groups of functional nouns were borrowed or derived from Latin and Greek showing the development of religious influence and science. The evolution of concepts and an appropriate vocabulary was necessary to describe a wide range of new or rediscovered domains like religion, art techniques, sciences and philosophy:

(1)     Latin: cristianitas         ?     Old French: crestientet (‘christianity’)
(2)     Latin: dismetri            ?     French: diamètre (‘diameter’)
(3)     Latin/Greek: spiritus    ?    Old French: esperit (‘spirit’)
(4)     Latin: amplitudo        ?    French: amplitude (‘amplitude’)
(5)     Latin: longitudinis        ?    French: longueur (‘length’)

On the basis of these concepts it appears that borrowed words undergo special grammatical derivations while becoming functional nouns. Suffixes like -tion, -esse, -eur, -age arose in Modern French. Just as definiteness and the fact of choosing a referent in the dependent possessor argument position seem to be characteristic of functional nouns, so does the existence of suffixes like the above-mentioned:

(6) fonction (‘function’)
(7) adresse (‘adresse’)
(8) couleur (‘colour’)
(9) langage (‘speech’)

The examination of functional nouns and their diachronic development shows that these concepts pass through metaphorical and metonymical processes. Evidence was found amongst others in linguistics: Concepts such as ‘morphology’, ‘roots’ or ‘valence’ were transferred from other scientific areas and associated with new scientific ideas.