Morphological aspects of English in early modern economic discourse (1600-1650): a corpus-based examination

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of Latin as the main repository for the creation of technical lexemes in the establishment of the microlanguage of economics in early modern England. As a vernacular, English lacked both prestige and vocabulary to deal with the new fields of knowledge as political economy, which entered a process of linguistic systematisation as a consequence of the widening range of functions that English required in its path towards standardisation. On the other hand, Latin preserved its status of high-prestige variety in the circulation of learned discourse, although it lost its currency as a lingua franca, and was still prominent in the creation of specialized taxonomies which occurred to be necessary for the new specialised discourse emerging during the Renaissance. Thus, this paper investigates the impact of the adoption of Latin-based morphemes in the creation of the most circulating terminology related to political economy in the late phase of the early modern era in England, i.e. 1600-1650. Considering the recent criticism against the traditional assumptions in the history of the English language, a preliminary corpus-based analysis will be conducted in a selection of key texts to evaluate both frequency and dispersion of the adoption of Latin-based morphemes: a quantitative approach will establish the general trends of the derivational processes of English in a selection of key tòpoi of early modern discourse; additionally, a qualitative approach is expected to retrieve prospective patterns of language to be identified in compliance with the evolution of English as a new standard in the diaphasic variety here investigated.