What Is the Status of the Element QUE in Contemporary French?

The paper makes assumptions about the grammatical category of the form que in French & the syntactic relations in which are involved the constituents it introduces. In all its uses in declarative sentence forms it is analyzed as a complementizer, contrasting with its pronominal status in interrogatives. As for the syntactic relations involving the whole constituent that que introduces, it is shown that they are of three types: -- a pragmatic marker linking an utterance to various "discourse patterns" -- a marker of conventionalized discourse routines resulting in "quasi-modifiers" -- a member of a specific type of "correlative" construction. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document