Suffixal derivative time-change analysis of sixteenth-century French: SAS Institute, Inc.

In an effort to understand how language changes across time. I have taken advantage of the information inherent in the lexicon of the sixteenth-century writer, Francois Rabelais, whose five major works occurred, for the most part, at five different points in time in the middle third of that century. The unit of analysis, or point of focus, has been some seventy suffixes active in the century. Initially, using historicaletymological dictionaries, I examined Rabelais' sixteenth-century derivatives, seeking to discover if and what the relations were between the numbers of such words both synchronically and diachronically in the five books. A major finding was that derivatives of suffixes of disparate syntactic categories (e.g. forming nouns and verbs) are included by Rabelais in parallel quantities across time. A large number of -ement words in his first work are accompanied by relatively large numbers of -er words in that work, while the second work contains smaller numbers of the derivatives of the two suffixes, for example. But these rises and falls apply to one group of syntactically disparate, derivative-forming suffixes, while another pattern of rises and falls.(i.e. rising and falling derivative tallies) applies to another, potentially disparate, group of derivative-forming suffixes. Why this occurs I can only attribute to whatever constraint rules govern sentence generation and, concomitantly, entire narratives: A sentence or a story cannot consist of all verbs, for example. But our knowledge of these constraints is so sparse that the asking of such fundamental questions of composition, both diachronic and synchronic, even if such asking only begets more questions, is promising.