This paper argues that the increasing number of non-specialist students of French in British universities requires us to investigate with some urgency the adequacy of 'general purpose' syllabi, grammars, and methodologies. Drawing on the work of researchers of ESP, of corpus-based approaches, of autonomous learning, and of the exploitation of authentic text, the paper illustrates its thesis by reference to the detailed analysis of a small corpus of spontaneous spoken French video-recorded at a horticultural research station in Normandy. This serves to highlight not only the lexical features associated with a particular field but also the syntactic features which characterize spoken French. Two difficulties of analysis are raised, relating to the indeterminacy of language and the non-discreteness of grammatical categories. A 'fuzzy' approach is recommended to the attribution of functional descriptors to syntactic elements and to the categorization of grammatical forms. The conclusion is reached that the effective design of syllabi and methodologies for Specific Purposes students is substantially enhanced through the detailed analysis of a spoken corpus which should be examined as a communicative event, not solely as an assemblage of linguistic items.