Summary

The label “neoclassical compounds” (NC) encompasses a set of phenomena found in, but not limited to, Romance languages. They can be roughly characterized as the emergence, in the lexicon of a language, of lexical units totally or partially made up of elements borrowed from ancient (classical) languages, namely Greek and Latin, and constructed by means of processes not (or not necessarily) corresponding to the “canonical” morphological processes at work in the language in question. Historically, the existence of NC in Romance languages is linked, on the one side, to the role played by Latin, and partly Greek, in the intellectual history of Europe; and, on the other side, to the various waves of relatinization Romance languages were subject to at different times, with two major turning points, in the 15th and 16th centuries, with the revival of classical authors advocated by Humanism and the Renaissance, and from the 18th century onward, with the development and democratization of scientific and technical knowledge. Progressively, NC have served as models for the emergence of productive word formation patterns which are, today, perfectly integrated into the derivational systems of Romance languages. However, rather than constituting a clearly delimited and homogeneous class, the label NC encompasses a constellation of phenomena sharing some characteristics that can globally be attributed to their common origin in the lexicon of neoclassical descent that has been transferred to Romance languages across the centuries.