The term “fictive motion” refers to the uses of verbs of motion which describe a static space configuration. This topic has thus far not been addressed systematically on empirical data, and its study was restricted to the sentence level. Basing our work on the verb lists of the Lexique-Grammaire, on the Frantext database, and on the theoretical framework proposed by Aurnague (2011b) on the semantics of motion verbs, I have extracted up to 600 instances of verb use coded as fictive motion, in discourse, in order to understand the mechanisms and motivations of such constructions.This thesis attempts to go beyond proposed distinctions between Path and Manner, or explanations based on the shape of entities, or even constraints blocking fictive motion uses. Our results highlight the importance of the Mode of discourse, stress the need for a framework in space semantics which relies on functional properties, rather than plain geometry, and advocates an approach based on the structure and the configuration between several entities.Besides, this thesis provides a classification, intended to be complete, of motion verbs in French, which elaborates on the notions of change of location and basic locative relation ; it also makes available a significant corpus of « fictive motion » verb uses for further linguistic studies.This thesis introduces several in-depth studies and paves the way for a new understanding of the ''figurative'' use of motion verbs.