  The work reported here is the result of a study done within a larger project
on the ``Semantics of Natural Languages'' viewed from the field of Artificial
Intelligence and Computational Linguistics. In this project, we have chosen a
corpus of insurance claim reports. These texts deal with a relatively
circumscribed domain, that of road traffic, thereby limiting the
extra-linguistic knowledge necessary to understand them. Moreover, these texts
present a number of very specific characteristics, insofar as they are written
in a quasi-institutional setting which imposes many constraints on their
production. We first determine what these constraints are in order to then show
how they provide the writer with the means to create as succint a text as
possible, and in a symmetric way, how they provide the reader with the means to
interpret the text and to distinguish between its factual and argumentative
aspects.
