Competing standards in university students’ formal productions: a corpus-based study

In this paper, I aim to analyse formal texts written by Italian university students from a sociolinguistic perspective. More specifcally, the linguistic nature of these texts with respect to the two diferent standards coexisting in the Italian scenario will be discussed; one standard is the old prescriptive and literary one, while the other is the so-called neo-standard which is the product of a process of downward convergence. Tree linguistic features will be considered and their behaviour in three diferent corpora will be compared. More specifcally, data will be extracted from a newly built resource consisting of university students’ formal productions and from two sections of the CORIS corpus (i.e. academic prose and journalistic prose). Data show that university students’ texts instantiate a very heterogeneous variety, which is distant from both ‘standard’ poles: while it is very prone to include some deviant linguistic features, it is reluctant to accept others.