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The aim of this paper is to identify and analyze three speech acts in the EU Fisheries  Website, which  belongs to the Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries; namely, advising,  requesting and performing  from both a quantitative (using the web as a corpus) and qualitative point of view. As noted by Wierzbicka (1987:182), one of the senses of advising (to inform someone about a future state of affairs) is a favored type of speech act in Fisheries Discourse, performed by professional people or people in a position of responsibility who need to communicate information which is beneficial for other parties involved. Highly codified instances of advising are produced by specifying declarative sentences by means of modality markers. The ones used in advising denote that the carrying out of the action would not only be recommendable but also obligatory according to a certain norm. The constructions under scrutiny are the following Must XVP, Ought To XVP,  Have to XVP,  Can XVP,  Need XVP,  Should XVP,  XVP Is A Good Idea, XVP Is The Best Option (Edmonson and House 1981;Biber et al 1998) Requests in this corpus show the following features: the speaker presents a future action; the future action involves a benefit to the speaker or a third party; there is mitigation and the degree of speaker’s will is high, supporting the findings of other studies (Pérez , 2001:115-130).  EU Fisheries favor the use of indirect requests with verbs such as Tell XVP,  Need XVP. The performative verbs used in directive and expressive speech acts belong to the semantic domain of communication verbs. The directive verbs occurring in the material are: appeal, authorize, call upon, conclude, invite, promise, request, urge and warn while the expressive verbs are: congratulate, express (gratitude), pay (tribute) and thank. The semantic analysis of directive verbs draws on Leech’s framework for illocutionary verbs analysis (Leech 1983: 218). The analysis suggests that the choice of directive and expressive speech act verbs and their co-occurrence with particular addressees are motivated by the socio-pragmatic situation. 30 Maritime Engineering students and 30 from the Naval Architecture degree also learned how these speech act verbs are used in context in the subject English for Professional and Academic Communication (2011-2012). Results indicate that:   1)A means for specifying the advising value of declaratives are modality markers, in particular the verbs must and could. Telling the addressee that the proposed action is obligatory to a certain extent is an implicit way of reminding him that he is expected to act in compliance with EU norms. The verb must conveys information with certainty and authority (Hyland 2000). 2) EU fisheries clearly favor in requests the declarative sentence type, contrary to the findings of other studies. The most recurring parameter of the generic structure instantiated by declarative constructions is the one making manifest the speaker’s need. Realizations of this type also make manifest the EU’s desire to get an action performed by the stakeholders involved in maritime affairs.   3) Explicit performative verbs in this institutional discourse contribute towards a proposition whose relevance lies in the way it directs the reader towards a particular interpretation of another proposition.   

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