THE MODALITY AND PRAGMATICS OF SHALL IN THE EU LEGISLATIVE TEXTS

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 addressee (Member State). Modal verbs emerge as a prime component in the EU legal language 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 generally and in the reference corpus specifically.