VOL. 53, BOOK 1, PART A, 2015, pp. 550 – 562 Full text (Bg)
Author: Kristina Krislova
Affiliation: Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv
Abstract
Modality plays a key role in the institutional language of the European Union, as it reveals the different pragmatic purposes of the EU legislative text types and mediates the communicative interaction between the legal authority (European institutions) and the ad-dressee (Member State). Modal verbs emerge as a prime component in the EU legal lan-guage disclosing a semantic flexibility to fulfill various pragmatic tasks. Employing the method of corpus analysis and contrastive textual analysis, the study shows that shall is the most prominent (prescriptive and performative) modal verb in the legislative texts general-ly and in the reference corpus specifically.
Key words: modality, pragmatics, legislative text of EU, prescriptive and performative language, shall
