Remanence of Et and relaunch in modern and contemporary French: from residue to remnant

This contribution attempts to show how the notion of "remanence" makes it possible to renew the description of obsolescent forms and structures of low frequency. In other words, it assesses the contribution, for diachronic linguistics, of an approach considering them no longer as "residues" - that is, outdated products, having lost part of their use value - but as "remainders "- that is, products resistant to the factors aimed at their elimination. The observatory chosen is that of "et de relance" (Serbat 1990), which functions, until classical French, as a demarcator of the units of discourse, so, as competiting or cooccurrent of some suprasegmental graphemes (the dot and the comma in particular). The paper questions its decline in frequency in modern French, contemporary period of the codification of punctuation. It shows the descriptive and explanatory superiority of the "remanentist" approach to the phenomenon over the traditionally required "archaic" approach.