ELF and linguistic accessibility in EU migration laws. A Critical Discourse Analysis on text reformulations


Abstract


Abstract – The present study examines a corpus of legal texts from the EU regarding Immigration and Political Asylum, that refer to the administrative practices and the procedures for claiming asylum, which involve immigrants and asylum seekers between the European Member States. At the core of the study, there is the awareness that these specialized text-types are mainly built on pragmatic strategies which mainly reflect Western routines. Such an issue is thus thought to be the main cause of misunderstandings between the EU and the mediators and the migrants, especially in terms of the ELF dynamics that are involved in the legal processes of discourse interpretation. Hence, the need to activate processes of hybridization in the form here of written reformulations, aimed at making the texts more accessible (Widdowson 1979) to the empirical receivers of the documents. As for the methodology, a Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995) is applied in order to point out the possible incongruities of the original statements, and thus to propose new reformulations.


DOI Code: 10.1285/i22390359v24p125

Keywords: ELF variations; power asymmetry; simplification strategies; CDA

References


Austin J.K. 1962, How to Do Things with Words, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Brown G. and Yule G. 1983, Discourse Analysis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

De Beaugrande R. and Dressler W. 1981, Introduction to Text Linguistics, Longman, London.

Carrell P.L. and Eisterhold J. C. 1988, Schema Theory and ESL Reading Pedagogy, in Interactive Approaches to Second Language Learning, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 73-92.

Fairclough N. 1995, Critical Discourse Analysis, Longman, London.

Goffman E. 1981, Forms of Talk, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.

Gotti M. 2005, Investigating Specialized Discourse, Peter Lang, Bern.

Grice H.P. 1975, Logic and Conversation, in P. Cole and Morgan J.L. (eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, Academic Press, New York, pp. 22-40.

Guido M.G. 1999, Processi di analisi e traduzione del discorso scientifico-settoriale inglese. Un modello psicopedagogico, Armando Editore, Roma.

Guido M.G. 2004. Mediating Cultures. A Cognitive Approach to English Discourse for the Social Sciences. LED, Milan.

Guido M.G. 2008, English as a lingua franca in cross-cultural immigration domains, Peter Lang, Bern.

Halliday M.A.K. 1994, An Introduction to Functional Grammar (1st edition 1985), Edward Arnold, London.

Martin J. and White R. 2005, The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, Palgrave Macmillan, London and New York.

Provenzano M. 2003, Problemi Traduttivi nella Documentazione ufficiale della Commissione Europea, in Gallo G. (a cura di), La Traduzione: un Panorama Interdisciplinare, Besa Editrice, Nardò, pp. 291-300.

Provenzano, M. 2008, The EU Legal Discourse of Immigration. A cross-cultural approach to accessibility and reformulation, Franco Angeli, Milano.

Roberts C. and Sarangi S. 1999, Talk, work and institutional order, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin.

Searle J.R. 1969, Speech Acts, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Sperti S. 2014, Phonopragmatic Dimensions of ELF in Specialized Immigration Contexts, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Salento.

Van Dijk T.A. 1980, Macrostructures: An Interdisciplinary Study of Global Structures in Discourse, Interaction, and Cognition, Erlbaum, Hillsdale.

Widdowson H. 1979, Explorations in Applied Linguistics, Oxford University Press, Oxford.


Full Text: pdf

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.
کاغذ a4

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Non opere derivate 3.0 Italia License.