The aim of this contribution is to compare Les Verbes français by Dubois & Dubois-Charlier (1997) with several papers dealing with the verbal expression of cause : concept based thesaurus, syntactic verb classification, meaning-text approach. In this way the productivity of these various points of view may be assessed. J. Dubois & F. Dubois-Charlier’s works, which results in a semantic classification based on the syntactic and distributional properties of all French verbs, appears to be the most compelling through its tight association of content and expression. It shows that languages establish their own semantic structure which is not equivalent with the referential or conceptual intuition.