The Popularisation of Legal Rights in Brochures: A Multimodal Analysis

This paper presents the preliminary results of a broader study into the communication of European Union legal rights to citizens. The EU produces its own legislation which is then implemented in the 27 Member States in different ways, depending on the type of law. In order to make legislation accessible to the lay public, one or more simplified versions of the legislation are published on the EU website. The present study analyses a corpus of brochures popularising EU legislation and proposes to investigate how verbal communication is complemented by visual elements in creating a relationship between the various participants. The findings indicate that the linguistic features in the brochures contribute to creating an interpersonal relationship between the EU institutions and the viewers more than the photos. However, despite their limited number, the photos that represent people support the linguistic elements in involving the lay public and to bringing them closer to EU institutions.