ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the characteristics of the genre model of legislative speech acts, as well as the indication of reasons and consequences of its style-related transformations: beginning with a directive with elements of persuasion, up to a declaration. The formal and semantic shape of the text is subordinate to its pragmatic function from this perspective a legislative speech act is a macro-act composed of micro-acts interconnected in a linear and hierarchical manner. The style of legislative speech acts and the communication of values performed in legal texts embrace the rules of legislation. At the level of international legal discourse the differentiation in the field of ethnorhetoric. The shaping of the Polish legislative speech act in terms of genre and style was affected by the ancient common law of Slavs and the practice of public courts where verdicts were passed, probably uttered with the use of conventional formulas, yet not reinforced locally in writing until the fourteenth century.
