The role of church history in the history of English : a terminological corpus-based analysis

In this paper we propose a corpus-based study of the linguistic competence of writers and translators who transferred the Greek and Latin knowledge of Christian Antiquity into English. This study points out a prevalence of church-related vocabulary as a specialised terminology, but it also focuses on other secondary domains such as demonyms and geographical terms. The study is based on the concepts, frameworks and methods of corpus-based Terminology (Cabré 1998, Gamper and Stock 1998), Specialised Discourse (Gotti 2005) and Specialised Translation (Gotti and Šarčević 2006). Our research will show that the mid-to late Sixteenth century was a period of impulse to the development of specialised/erudite language in the history of English; if individual translators might remain marginal, their collective contribution to the language of religion and scholarship is certainly not negligible.