Abstract
The use of the specificity program, applied to the general manifestos of the CFTC-CFDT congresses held between 1945 and 1979, has been deliberately restricted to the study of function words and certain discourse phenomena (the role of the speaker as projected with the universe of discourse, certain classes of verbs, determiners, adverbs and conjunctions, the representation of the contextual setting of the utterance and of the hearers) in order to show the usefulness of such an approach. The formal patterns extracted lead to a typology of the texts examined, and to a socio-linguistic enquiry into the role of the text types identified.