How do Old French legal documents express purpose clauses

Old French legal documents express purpose clauses primarily using several mechanisms, with notable frequency and variety compared to artistic or literary texts of the same period. The expression of purpose is often conveyed through:

• Subordinate purpose clauses introduced by the conjunction pour que, which marks the purpose explicitly. This union appears from a certain time in the texts.
• Equivalent constructions involving prepositional-infinitive and prepositional-substantive phrases, predominantly introduced by the preposition pour. These are especially common when the subject of the main and purpose clauses is the same.
• The use of moods in subordinate clauses indicating the anticipation of the result or action the speaker wishes to achieve.
• Variability in the positioning of the subordinate purpose clause, either before or after the main clause, depending on sentence structure, rhythm, and logical-communicative division.

Thus, Old French legal documents present a system of expressing purpose that is more frequent and varied than in other contemporary texts, combining both subordinating conjunctions and prepositional constructions with infinitives or nouns to convey the semantic relation of goal or purpose. ¹

References

• EXPRESSION OF PURPOSE IN OLD FRENCH LEGAL DOCUMENTS

• On the specific features of legal translation (A comparative study of the German, French and Spanish languages)

• MODERN MECHANISMS FOR COMBATING ABUSIVE CLAUSES IN INSURANCE DOCUMENTS “A COMPARATIVE STUDY”

• Urban privileges (‘keuren’) in medieval Flanders: charters or dynamic legal documents?

• Historical Corpus and Historical Dictionary : Merging Two Ongoing Projects of Old French by Integrating their Editing Systems

• Communicative and Senior Content of Legal Documents

• How Do ‘The Old’ and ‘The New’ Live Together? the Principal Purpose Test and Other Anti-avoidance Instruments in Tax Treaties

• Between rhetorical and performative aspects of the stipulatio-clause in Greek legal documents of Egypt

• Evaluating Shallow and Deep Learning Strategies for Legal Text Classification of Clauses in Non-Disclosure Agreements

• Double Names in the Documentary Papyri and in Paul: Some Legal Considerations on the Agreement in Jerusalem

• “Des peines en général” in the French “Code pénal” of 1791

• Appendix 1: Glossary of the Universal Constitution

• The Network of French Legal Codes

• Pacta sunt servanda: legal contracts in Stipula

• Negotiating French Social Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century Letters to a Representative for the Rhône Department

• Merchants’ agents and the process of bottom-up harmonization between European towns, fourteenth to sixteenth centuries

• The “Grévy Constitution” and the “de Gaulle Constitution”: Two Directions for the Relocation of Presidential Power in the Constitutional History of France

• Relative Clause French: An Approach to Syntactic Typology

• Bringing Certainty and Order Out of the Wilderness of Law

• Insights into a Changing Communal Constructicon

• The evidence of hearsay in criminal proceedings from Late Renaissance France

• La relation épistolaire au Moyen Âge

• Water Property Models as Sovereignty Prerogatives: European Legal Perspectives in Comparison

• Citation networks in administrative law books from the civil law world (nineteenth century)

• LA PROPRIETE INTELLECTUELLE La protection de la propriété intellectuelle sur le vivant : historique et débats actuels autour des variétés végétales

• Printing the Law in the 15th Century