La popolarizzazione delle leggi europee attraverso i canali multimediali: aspetti linguistici e obiettivi comunicativi

European Union institutions have made EU legislative texts accessible to the lay public by popularising them in a variety of multimedia products which are available on the EU website. Effective communication with the citizens is key not only to facilitate their understanding of their legal rights, but also for the EU institutions to gain credibility and build trust. The present paper investigates how EU laws concerning consumer rights are made accessible to non-specialists through brochures and web pages available on the official website, and videos on the institutional YouTube channel. The study was carried out with a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis approach and compared the corpus of popularised laws with a corpus of original EU legislation from the same area of law. The research aims, firstly, to establish which elements distinguish the popularised texts from the original laws at a lexical and morphosyntactic level and, secondly, to determine what effects the linguistic choices have on the meaning that is being communicated. Findings reveal that the communication in the popularised texts tends to be interactional and direct. It also relies heavily on storytelling as a way of informing citizens of their rights by providing concrete examples they can easily relate to. The analysis has shown how there is an emphasis, on the one hand, on the risks that consumers face and, on the other, on the help and protection that EU institutions offer through the legislation they have adopted. Thus, while informing the citizens of their rights, the various linguistic choices characterising the popularised texts give prominence to the value of the initiatives undertaken by the EU with the overall effect of promoting the image of the EU institutions.