This present work offers a precise account of the conjunction alors que (‘then’, ‘whereas’) as it is used in spoken and written contemporary French. Using the micro-/macro-syntax approach, this description is based on the analysis of 3 000 occurrences of alors que from several corpora. It is demonstrated that the constructions introduced by alors que can be classified into five main syntactic types, only one of them presenting a truly “subordinating” effect. In addition to analyzing their specific syntactic structure, the semantic value of the different uses are described.