The work is devoted to the development of the distributive properties of the French polyfunctional item donc ‘therefore, so’ in a broad diachronic perspective, from the 11th century to the present. As a result of accessing the data of the National Corpus of the French language Frantext and the French corpus of the Google books Ngram Viewer system, the trajectory of the development of donc as a coordinator is determined. It is concluded that the long-term variability of the donc written forms, which differ in distributive properties in texts of different genres, leads to multidirectional trends in its use as a coordinator. As a result of comparing the contexts in which donc shows its conjunctive properties and establishes the logical-semantic relations of the consequence, the following is established. The share of donc usage as a coordination unit of two independent sentences in the initial position has been significantly reduced over more than a thousand years of the French language development. This way of donc use is not predominant. The use of donc in the postposition to the personal form of the verb to establish a connection, with the exception of the imperative mood, tends to gradually increase. The donc use in cooccurrence with other coordinating conjunctions (et donc, ou donc, mais donc, etc.) is a special case of it’s functioning. The results obtained complement the previous scientific knowledge about the functioning and syntactic mobility of donc and are necessary for comparison with information of this kind about other linking words.