This dissertation meets a gap in French linguistic studies, as far as the morpheme quand has never been described in a systematic way, contrary to other items of the qu- (wh-) family. Nevertheless, even addressing canonical examples of so called "subordinate quand", many important issues remain unresolved, concerning the categorical status as well as the syntactic behaviour of this item. We begin by presenting a review of the analysis of all the cases of quand that can be found in the literature, and a critical appraisal of the current frameworks. Then we address the inadequacies of the empirical basis on which rely traditional descriptions, by means of a corpus based approach using written and spoken authentic data, including examples from the Web. The collected examples are next analysed in a descriptive framework based on the "approche pronominale" (Blanche Benveniste et alii, 1984). The main results are: quand has mainly the distributional status of a pronoun, it is found either in "movement" or ordinary clauses, and is involved in a wide scope of syntactic structures from grammatical constructions to discourse patterns.
