Reference in teenagers’narratives between plurilingualism and restandardisation

This study examines referential choices in narrative texts in Italian, written by monolingual and bilingual adolescents; it adopts a double perspective, investigating both strategies for reference tracking and sociolinguistic variation in pronoun choice. Results show that referential expressions (REs) are used adequately across all groups, with monolinguals and simultaneous bilinguals displaying similar patterns, while sequential bilinguals using pronouns less frequently. In terms of pronoun choice, adolescents overwhelmingly favor neostandard forms for both subject and indirect-object pronouns, while standard variants have nearly disappeared. Notably, the study provides evidence of an interesting linguistic tendency among Italian teenagers: the use of li, lit. ‘them’, as indirect object for both genders and numbers.