European integration: connectives in EU legislation

Multilingualism and diversity in legal culture delay the process of European legal integration. While most of the literature on multilingualism and translation in the legal domain focuses on nouns or noun phrases, such as contract or due diligence, this article is concerned with connectives, such as notwithstanding or subject to. Despite the fact that semantic equivalence is a prerequisite for both interpretation and implementation of EU legislation, such connectives are used inconsistently in both primary and secondary legislation. This paper argues that it is possible to achieve a better understanding of the semantic differences in law by adopting a comparative text linguistics approach, and offers strategies on how to tackle the problem on both a theoretical and a practical level.