“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”. Do Loanwords Help Our Understanding of Economic and Financial Terminology?. In D. Torretta (ed). Contacts: Studies in Intralinguistic, Interlinguistic and Intersemiotic Relationships, Bari, Edizioni dal Sud, pp. 109-136.

This paper focuses on the role that loanwords (or borrowings) play in economic and financial texts belonging to popular and academic genres. Specifically, the study considers some cases taken from literary (theatre) or popular genres (newspapers articles, cinema); therefore, the language used is expected to be easily understandable by the audience. In fact, the frequent occurrence of loanwords/borrowings and calques tends to make this task harder for members of non-specialized communities. In the case of Italian, for example, texts are today invaded by numberless English words which, to use an economic metaphor, are causing loss to the language capital (Bourdieu 1991), rather than bringing profit.