EU Presidency Programmes as a Genre

Abstract

Along with acting in political, economic and social arenas of the European Union, Latvia was also honoured to preside over the Council of Europe in 2015. This has resulted in the creation of the network of genres pertinent to this communicative event in both Latvian and English to reflect the discursive practices involved. In this view, the present cross-sectional empirical research aims at exploring the written genre of the European Union presidency programmes as one of fundamental documents to propose a set of tentative activities in various economically and socially significant spheres. The theoretical framework for analysis involved the fundamental principles of institutional discourse and the tenets of English for Specific Purposes and New Rhetoric Genre Schools. The exploration of the situational context involves the description of players, the discursive practices and the genre as a textual manifestation of this practice. The results of genre analysis highlight the centrality of the communicative aim and rigid generic macro-structure of a relatively novel genre, which relates to the colony of reporting genres performing the transactional language metafunction. The variation of optional moves occurs as allowed by the communicative aim, which contributes to genre integrity. The topicality of the study is determined by the scarcity of previous research on the genre in question and wide application of research findings.