ELF reformulation in the EU laws on immigration: a case study

1. ELF reformulation in the EU laws on immigration: a case study Mariarosaria Provenzano Department of Foreign Languages and Literature - University of Salento (Lecce) - Italy

2. Research Objective • In the context of cross-cultural communication in the field of Immigration Laws, there is a need for reformulating them into ELF to make them accessible and acceptable to asylum seekers. Research Focus • Pragmalinguistic approach to Intercultural Communication: processes of production and reception of EU legislation on immigration. Method: ELF Reformulation processes • Making legal texts accessible to non-EU migrants by adapting: - van Dijk’s Macrorules and - de Beaugrande and Dressler’s seven standards of textuality to their reformulation in cross-cultural immigration contexts.

3. Hypothesis Case Study • The Schengen Convention establishes entry requirements to non-EU migrants. • Accessibility to the Convention hindered by the Western legislators’ linguistic/ pragmatic strategies informed by their own L1 discourse patterns. Theoretical background • Discourse inefficiency explored through Schema Theory (Carrell et al. 1983).

4. Rationale • Need for developing new parameters of textuality for institutional documents in ELF within an intercultural perspective: • Cohesion = syntactic text organisation according to the receiver’s linguacultural conventions. • Coherence = conceptual/logicaldiscourse organization according to the receivers’ specialized schemata. • Informativity = conformity to reader’s expectations in terms of information supply. • Intentionality = text producer’s achievement of discourse goals. • Acceptability = reader’s acceptance of the message conveyed. • Intertextuality=re-drafting and re-organisation of a previous discourse in terms of reader’s background knowledge.

5. Art. 30 of the Schengen Convention • 1. The Contracting Party responsible for processing an application for asylum shall be determined as follows: • (a) If a Contracting Party has issued an asylum seeker with a visa, of whatever type, or a residence permit, it shall be responsible for processing the application. If the visa was issued on the authorisation of another Contracting Party, the Contracting Party which gave the authorisation shall be responsible. • (b) If two or more Contracting Parties have issued an asylum seeker with a visa, of whatever type, or a residence permit, the Contracting Party responsible shall be the one which issued the visa or the residence permit that will expire last. • (c) As long as the asylum seeker has not left the territories of the Contracting Parties, the responsibility defined in (a) and (b) shall remain even if the period of validity of the visa, of whatever type, or of the residence permit has expired. If the asylum seeker has left the territories of the Contracting Parties after the visa or the residence permit has been issued, these documentsshall be the basis for responsibility as defined in (a) and (b), unless they have expired in the meantime under national provisions. • (d) If the Contracting Parties exempt the asylum seeker from the visa requirement, the Contracting Party across whose external borders the asylum seeker entered the territories of the Contracting Parties shall be responsible.

6. Phase 1: Analysis of art.30processing an asylum request • The relevance of this article is determined by the aim of the encoded norm. Semantic and pragmatic implications of vague and blurred use of ‘definitions’ (i.e. ‘external borders’) identifiable in its paragraphs. Analysis : • - agentless passive, no indication of the Member State in charge of processing an asylum request (par. a) • - arbitrary use of deontic modals “shall” and “will” with reference to a Member State’s responsibility in processing an asylum application (par. b) • - abstractness in the transitive representation of responsibility (par. c) • - ineffectiveness of ‘intertextuality’ on ‘coherence’ (par. c) • - use of pre-modification in post-modified clause to identify the State in charge (par. d)

7. A. Original document (art.30, c) As long as the asylum seeker has not left the territories of the Contracting Parties, the responsibility defined in (a) and (b) shall remain even if the period of validity of the visa, of whatever type, or of the residence permit has expired. If the asylum seeker has left the territories of the Contracting Parties after the visa or the residence permit has been issued, these documentsshall be the basis for the responsibility as defined in (a) and (b), unless theyhave expired in the meantime under national provisions. B. Reformulation (art.30, c) As long as the asylum seeker has not left the territories of the Schengen States, the Statethat issued the visa, or the residence permit that expires last, shall be responsible, even if the period of validity of the documents has expired. If the asylum seeker has left the territories of the States after the issue of the visa or of the residence permit, the State responsible shall be the one which issued the document that expires last, unless the documents have expired in the meantime under national provisions”. ELF Reformulation method Intra-linguistic reformulation of the original version based on ‘Macrorules’ (Van Dijk 1980)

8. Phase 2: ELF Reformulation analysisApplication of van Dijk’s (1980)Macrorules • Deletion macrorule and active representation of roles entailing concrete identification of the State responsible • Generalization macrorule, unifying the two required ‘classes’ of documents (i.e. the visa, or residence permit), into one word, “the documents”, to be more accessible to asylum seekers • Shift from deontic modal ‘will’ to Present Simple to convey the idea of ‘truth’, not mere ‘intentionality’ • Deletion macrorule in intertertextuality case(s), vaguely cross-referring to previous paragraph that softened the prescriptive content of the clause and the intended responsibility (“the responsibility defined in (a) and (b)”) • Replacement of anaphoric ‘they’ with the actual Subject referred to (“the documents”), to make it more cohesive. • ‘Extension’ of paragraph (d)

9. Fieldwork • Quotation from reformulated version of art.1 and response of a Kenyan immigrant • From fieldwork notes (I: Interviewer; K: Kenyan immigrant): • I: Do you find the concept of “external borders” clearer in the reformulated version? (The reformulated lines are reported below): • internal borders: shall mean the common land and sea borders of two Schengen Countries, the two Countries’ airports for internal flights and their sea ports for regular ferry connections, exclusively from or to ports within the two Countries, and without any intermediate calling at any port outside those territories. • external borders: shall mean the land and sea borders, alongside with the airports and sea-ports, demarcating one Schengen country and one non-Schengen country. • application for asylum: shall mean any application submitted in writing, orally or in any alternative form by a foreigner at an external border or within the territory of a Schengen Country… • I: Is it more precise than the original version? • K: Yes. But […] can a Schengen State have both “internal” and “external” borders?

10. Conclusions: research implications • ELF Reformulation as a viable approach to this controversial European document especially when it is aimed at the training of experts in intercultural mediation. • Concepts of a ‘new’ political and bureucratic reality should be made clear and effective when dealing with immigrants and asylum seekers in institutional encounters by using ELF.