Gramatička kompetencija na periferiji standardnoga jezika

The paper addresses deviations from the standard language norm on the grammatical level. Although it is expected of teachers of Croatian to display the highest degree of competence at all levels of language (description), an analysis of essays written by trainee teachers of Croatian at the licence examination revealed a deviation from the standard language norm. The paper uses a corpus of 90 essays to analyse the incorrect use of conjunctions budući (da) and jer, s obzirom na to da, kako... tako, followed by the preposition kroz, the change of government relations of the verb koristiti (se), as well as the non-normative spelling of Future I tense when the enclitic follows the verb ending in -ti, and the position of the enclitic within the sentence. The paper objective is to define the reasons and frequency of such deviations and using the cognitive model of grammatical competence, we will ascertain if the deviations are exclusively mistakes or we can speak of doublets or even linguistic changes.