Sulla testualità degli elaborati scritti del Laboratorio di piemontese dell’Università di Torino

Since the academic year 2015/2016, the University of Turin holds a Piedmontese Laboratory, that is a course where, along with Piedmontese regional literature, the structures of the language are taught, and proficiency is enhanced. Attendants had mainly Italian as an L1 and had some to no command of Piedmontese. In this article we investigate the referring expressions used in a number of papers submitted for the laboratory as assignments and we find that Italian- Piedmontese bilinguals, when writing in Piedmontese, tend to overspecify referring expressions (i.e. make use of overt or explicit forms linked to a highly activated referent) in comparison to what is expected by native/fluent speakers of Italian, but also by native/fluent speakers of Piedmontese. The tendency is explained by appealing to the need to compensate for possible nontargetlike features of the attendants’ (inter)language, and to the type of the texts under scrutiny (written and informative/argumentative).