Sulla variazione di registro nella scrittura formale degli studenti universitari: un'indagine sul corpus University-ita

The aim of this paper is to verify whether and to what extent university students are able to adapt their written productions to a formal communicative context. We analyzed 210 texts from UniverS-Ita corpus, which collects formal texts of university students who attended programs in different areas (Humanities, Economic Sciences, Healthcare, Engineering) during the 2020-2021 academic year. We examined the strategies employed, especially at the lexical level, to raise the linguistic register: in our data we found some traits of supra-standard varieties (i.e. bureaucratic, refined formal and educated varieties), such as passive and impersonal verb forms, nominalizations, collateral technical terms. However, in most cases students are unable to maintain the formal register as they produce texts in which bureaucratisms, archaisms and colloquialisms are used simultaneously. These frequent fluctuations in register are evidence of a limited awareness of stlylistic variability.