EU legislative discourse on unaccompanied minors: Exploring conceptual-linguistic architecture

The article explores EU institutional discourse on administrative and legal issues related to unaccompanied minors, arriving to the EU countries. The choice of the research topic is relevant within the UN Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development, the critical role of major international organizations and their law within the overall international landscape. The paper aims to consider the current state of affairs in academic research with regard to discourse studies on unaccompanied minors, to identify key topics and concepts within the EU institutional discussion on unaccompanied minors, and to map their verbal representation tools. The research rested on the theory of discourse interdisciplinary studies and combined quantitative and qualitative approaches. The investigation based on content analysis and analysis of conceptual frame models. The research material included EU documents on unaccompanied minors during the period of 2000-2019. The findings have made it possible to conclude that the phenomenon of unaccompanied minors operates in the EU administrative-legal communication as a conceptual semantic macrostructure. It is represented by a hierarchy of 10 major thematic codes (major concepts) within the EU legal-administrative communication, and 38 subcodes (sub-concepts) that are present in the respective sources with the difference percentage of frequency. © 2020 Allied Business Academies.