L’expression de la finalité dans le discours oral

Résumé

In this paper, we will first establish the syntactic and semantic criteria necessary to express purpose, starting with, but not limiting ourselves to, the work by Fradin (1989) and Cadiot (1990). The notion of purpose, or the expression of an aim, is complex and leaves ample room for interpretation. We will present, therefore, a series of objective and operational linguistic criteria to identify an aim. Clauses expressing purpose will be analysed in the framework of oral discourse: we will then be in a position to indicate which are the most widely used prepositions or phrases conveying purpose in the oral expression. We will see that pour ‘for’, inter alia, is the most frequently used preposition but also the most ambiguous one. Analysing the corpus will allow us to fine-tune the speech conditions conducive or necessary to a final understanding.