Dai testi scritti alla sgrammatichetta. Sullo status del burocratese della Regione Campania

Abstract

This paper is divided into four parts. The first part traces the interweaving of production (in particular written production) and (in)comprehension as in Demaurian thought. In the second part, a specific study, which is a section of a broader project entitled Public Administration: simplifying decision-making processes, improving performances , is presented. This study’s aim is to observe in texts written by the Campania Region those typical linguistic features of bureaucratese which can generate problems of comprehension. For the realization of the study, as a first step three texts homogeneous with respect to some variables but different with respect to others were selected (the texts are public notices or announcements through which European Union financial resources are provided to external and heterogeneous users). As a second step, fourteen comparable articles were extracted from the texts and analyzed at the morphosyntactic, lexical and textual levels. If on the one hand the analysis shows the resistance of a by now consolidated bureaucratese, on the other hand it is possible to outline a bureaucratese moving in synchrony downwards, characterized by grammar mistakes which occur repeatedly at the graphic, syntactic and lexical levels. These grammar mistakes are collected in a model of bureaucratese short ungrammar ( sgrammatichetta ) elaborated in the third part of the paper. The fourth and last part is a reflection on the role of schools and universities, places dedicated to training in even bureaucratic writing, and on the main results of some didactic experiments already carried out on (re)writing bureaucratic texts.