The paper makes assumptions about the grammatical category of the form que in French and the syntactic relations in which are involved the constituents it introduces. In all its uses in declarative sentence forms it is analysed 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.