Spotto la quarantena: per una analisi dell'italiano scritto degli studenti universitari via social network in tempo di COVID-19
Authors: Francesca Chiusaroli, Johanna Monti, Maria Laura Pierucci, Gennaro Nolano (Università di Macerata, Università di Napoli L'Orientale, 2020)
Topic: Learner Corpora and Language Acquisition

Abstract
Italian For an analysis of the written Italian of university students, a privileged context is found in those social channels of sharing among peers known with the title of "Spotted" . Activities particularly on Instagram, these are channels of informal public interaction that provide significant elements to the survey on the spontaneous writings of young people on the net. This research presents a corpus of over thirty thousand texts from Italian university Spotted. Focusing on the Covid phases (and on the immediately preceding period), we intend to illustrate how the corpus Spotted-Ita appears to be functional to a survey related to linguistic communication on the occasion of a unique and extraordinary experience experienced by university students.

Introduction
Among the manifestations of the youth language, a particular role is acquitted by the writings of university students, who, despite the differences between the training courses (conventionally distinct in humanistic and scientific), attest to writing skills concerning the most educated layer of the young generations, the most educated on the standard uses of the language, and also exposed to the informal communication conditions of the web. On this basis, there are numerous academic analyses and researches aimed at defining the balance, the differences, the interferences, that are triggered between the various expressions of the written language within the diasystem of writings, from the places of the strictest formality (such as the thesis of degree) to those of maximum spontaneity (communications through social networks and instant messaging platforms). The natural permeability and l'osmotic relationship between the formal and informal levels, or public and private, reveals, in the student's writing, the typical opening to neological and non-standard forms (for graphics, grammar and lexic), induced by the so-called Internet language ('short' digital writings), and highlights the attached emotional connotation that of such adoptions constitutes the direct implication of expressive\footnote{In addition to the wide bibliography on the theme of the language and of the youth languages, of which only a few titles will be mentioned in the bibliography of this contribution, it is interesting here to mention, as a reference point for the general theme, the National Research Project 2017, "UniverS-Ita." L'italiano Written by university students: socio-linguistic framework, typological trends, educational implications currently under way: (). For the purposes of the term "digital shortwriters," see: Brevi scriptures, research project and blogs, on . The contribution of F. Chiusaroli and M.L. Pierucci in this paper consists of the theoretical and analytical system and is part of the PRIN "UniverS-Ita" . J. Monti and G. Nolano took care of the collection of the corpus, the placements, the realization of the graphs and tables and the more general computational framework. The results of the contribution presented are shared by all authors.}.\newline For an analysis of the writing of today's university students, a privileged context is found in those social sharing channels known with the titled "Spotted" . These virtual places constitute an environment of elective interaction of students, in particular with regard to the Instagram platform, which - compared to the case of Facebook for example - guarantees the analysis the quality of the bulletin board currently most popular and widely used among young people, suitable for the purpose of pouring their thoughts and also submit doubts and questions addressing them to the peer group and .}.\newline Of general diffusion on a national scale, Spotted is a graphical-textual format that is characterized primarily by the anonymization of senders ensured by administrators who act as editor at the time of publication. In this way, therefore, the intervention of the author of each post appears to be free from any conditioning exercised by an external garrison or of the world "adult" (in particular, in the specific case, educators and teachers) so that, in Spotted, an informal and at the same time public writing is offered to the analysis, slang but aimed at wide diffusion, interesting for the form as well as for the shared contents. \newline This contribution is organised as follows: Section 2 deals with the corpus Spotted-Ita, on whose composition detailed information is provided together with a description of the manner in which the posts are collected; Section 3 deals with the linguistic analysis carried out on two sub-corporea related to the posts published by the students during the two months before and during the two months during the lockdown; finally, the conclusions follow.

Conclusion
Analyzing the written Italian language of university students through the texts posted on the Instagram social platform, in particular the Spotted, provides a focus of nodal research in the panorama of academic and scientific studies on the nature of the language of young people. In this context, in recording the progress of conversations in pre- and post-quarantine, the corpus Spotted-ita provides a privileged point of view for the analysis of the student's experience in the unprecedented and exclusive conditions known in the most significant social phase of the health emergency COVID-19. Combined with the tools of computational linguistics, the analysis presented here illuminates some aspects of the language use of students, in informal contexts, typically non-standard, but also, for the peer group, public contexts, allowing to redefine the communicative needs with respect to the new conditions of everyday activities and study carried out at a distance. It emerges a peculiar and unique observatory, therefore, which exemplarily reflects and reproduces, in terms of linguistic representation, the experience of a historical period, never otherwise experienced in contemporary times, of physical unbundling of the university community.