purposesmarking

Purposesmarking is a linguistic term used to describe the set of grammatical devices that signal the purpose or intended outcome of an action within a sentence. It encompasses strategies that encode why an action is undertaken, rather than merely describing the action itself. Purposesmarking can appear at different structural levels, including clausal, verbal, and nominal constructions.

Across languages, purpose marking is realized in several common ways. One major pattern is clausal: subordinate purpose clauses or infinitival constructions that express intent, often introduced by dedicated particles or conjunctions. For example, English uses infinitival to-markers like "to" in phrases such as "study to pass the exam," while German employs a dedicated structure like "um … zu" to indicate purpose. Other languages use postpositions or case-marked nouns to mark the goal of an action, akin to a purposive case or particle.

Functions and scope of purposesmarking vary. It can specify the agent’s goal, clarify the intended outcome of an action, or distinguish purpose from related notions such as reason or result. In typology, researchers investigate how these markings interact with tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality, and how they pattern with other subordinate clauses.

Purposesmarking is of interest in theoretical syntax and semantics because it touches on the syntax–semantics interface, cross-linguistic variation, and the ways languages encode goals and intentions. While the exact term may be used variably, the underlying concept—grammatical indication of purpose—appears in many language families under a range of manifestations.