Lo scritto formale di studenti universitari tra vecchio e nuovo standard. Il caso dei pronomi di terza persona singolare

The paper provides a sociolinguistic analysis of the behavior of third-person singular pronouns in formal texts written by university students. In the first part, I present the variety from a sociolinguistic perspective, also in relation to the old and the new standard. Then, I focus on the behavior of the third-person singular pronouns, in terms of function, syntactic distribution and sociolinguistic markedness. In the 3rd paragraph I discuss data and methods and then I move to the analysis. After a brief overview of the scrutinized variety, I compare the frequencies of the third person singular pronouns in university texts and in a corpus of neo-standard example of journalistic Italian; finally, a detailed analysis is presented on the uses of pronouns in university texts. The results show the coexistence in formal written productions of constructions with very diversified sociolinguistic connotations. This scenario can be explained by considering the tensions caused by the coexistence of two standards in the architecture of contemporary Italian.