A new standard Italian: survey on the academic writing of students of the universities of Palermo and Messina

In the mid-1980s, Sabatini and Berruto theorised the need to support the Italian standard via non-standard varieties (“average use,” or neo-standard) towards which the norm’s barycentre progressively had shifted. Thirty years later, and in light of the dynamism that the uses of speakers have impressed on the system, the issue has become a central one yet again.
This paper investigates the main features of university students’ written language. The corpus consists of 300 e-mails sent to professors and 150 drafts of degree dissertations, produced by students of the degree courses in Humanities, Foreign Languages, Education, and Communication of the Universities of Palermo and Messina.
Despite lacking any quantitative relevance, the results of this research allow us to identify which features of neo-standard Italian are now accepted by speakers in their language uses at the level of (semi-)formal writing, such as academic writing, and to propose a new reflection on the need to redefine the norm of contemporary Italian.

Legal Question to the Constitutional Tribunal. Expectations and Directions of Changes

This study is devoted to the analysis of the provision of Article 193 of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland, which authorizes each court to submit a legal question to the Polish constitutional court about the compliance of a normative act with the Constitution, ratified international treaties or the act, if the answer to a legal question depends on the resolution of a case pending before the court. It is worth considering the expectations and directions of changes of the analyzed institution against the background of the applicable legal provisions. The practice of applying a legal question to the Constitutional Tribunal needs to be examined. During these more than thirty-five years, the constitutional measure has undergone some transformations. The main goal of this work is to assess the title legal question through the prism of over three decades of its operation.