Lingue e Linguaggi (Jan 2016)
Strategie di accessibilità e negoziazione in testi legali della UE in ELF: un approccio cognitivo-funzionale all’analisi critica del discorso in contesti migratori
Abstract
Abstract – The present chapter focuses on a corpus of legal texts from the EU regarding immigration and political asylum, and concerns in particular the administrative practices involving immigrants in member states. At the basis of the study, there is the awareness that these specialized text-types are mainly built on pragmatic strategies which are principally and practically a reflection of Western routines. Such a biased representation of legal meanings and relationships is thus thought to be the main cause of misunderstandings between the parties involved, and damaging to the relationship between the authorities, on the one hand, and, on the other, the subjects of the procedures, both migrants and asylum seekers. It follows that a thorough procedure of analysis, and an intra-lingual translation (Gotti 2005) are needed. The corpus selected is analysed on the basis of a Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995), and then reformulated through van Dijk’s macrorules (1980). The fieldwork concludes the practical part of the work, and serves to: (a) highlight the relevant incongruities between the illocutionary meanings of the original statements, and the perlocutionary effect produced on receivers; and (b) propose new formulae/new patterns of action, in order to make rules accessible (Widdowson 1979) to the real receivers of the texts.
