This paper focuses on the French adverb autrement from a pragmasemantic point of view. The main purpose of this study is to show that autrement has several meanings. Even though it belongs to French – ment adverbs, it also works as a connective when combining two sentences, or two cotexts p and q. After classifying some of its attested uses, especially on syntactic grounds, the study puts the emphasis on its pragmatic function in French oral discourse. The main claim here is that autrement obviously rests upon a negative statement while connecting semantic entities: p autrement q introduces a logical implication between p and q, whose approximate meaning is: “Il you don’t want to have q, than you have to do p”. In other words, p and q are closely related by means of a contradictory relation.