EU Political and legal discourse on Immigration and Asylum

The aim of the PhD thesis is to investigate EU policy and legislation on immigration and asylum through the analysis of two different types of documents: Presidency Conclusions of EU Councils and Directives on immigrants’ rights (1999 - 2008). An analysis of the context aims at providing the framework to the linguistic analysis of the Presidency Conclusions of European Councils on immigration and asylum and EU Directives on specific rights to be granted to refugees and displaced people. The research question is based on the assumption that the employment of vague language can affect the legal efficacy of the law. The last part of the research aims at to exploring the presence of vagueness in Directives on illegal immigration in relation to the issues investigated in Directives on legal immigration. All the theoretical assumptions are defended through the employment of the software AntConc 3.2.1. The methodology adopted include studies on vagueness in normative texts (Endicott 2001; Bhatia / Engberg / Gotti / Heller 2005; Engberg / Heller 2008), on the semantics and vagueness of adjectives (Pinkal 1995; Fjeld 2005), on vagueness and ambiguity in relation to modal auxiliary verbs (Caliendo 2004a; Bhatia / Candin / Engberg (eds) 2008; Williams 2005, 2007), on evaluation (Hunston / Thompson 2000), on ideology and discourse (Fairclough 1989; Fairclough 2003; van Dijk, 2000, 2003).