Neoclassical Borrowing and Influence on English

The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English vocabulary witnessed a sort of revolution, due to the massive influx of new words and coinages primarily from Classical languages. They were largely introduced by scholars to supply English with an appropriate terminology for fields traditionally dominated by Latin, but also to provide the richness of vocabulary (copia verborum), considered the hallmark of a literary language and Renaissance rhetoric as well as a sign of education or social superiority. Their ‘artificiality’ and ‘abstruseness’ provoked a fierce debate among purists and innovators, known as the Inkhorn controversy, and made necessary the production of dictionaries devoted to explain such hard words. Sign of the creativity of these centuries, most of them remained in the language and contributed to shape the structure vocabulary. A text-corpus analysis of hard words in a so-far neglected genre – namely early modern street literature texts (pamphlets, broadsheets and ballads) devoted to monstrous births – will shed light on the mechanisms of their diffusion.