This paper looks at the interpretation of legal texts, with a special emphasis on the legislative ones, from the semiotic and pragmatic points of view. The interpretation of a legislative text must start by considering it as a product of a communication act, performed through linguistic signs, and therefore it has to be studied within basic semiotic categories. Secondly, legislations are texts, and they must therefore be analyzed with the aid of textual linguistics. Thirdly, legislative texts and their legal utterances (...) are all speech acts, and consequently they must be interpreted from the perspective of the pragmatic theory of speech acts. (shrink)