SUMMARYOur problem is about propagation of waves in stratiÿed strips. The operators are quite general, a typical example being a coupled elasto-acoustic operator H deÿned in R 2 × I where I is a bounded interval of R with coe cients depending only on z ∈ I . One applies the 'conjugate operator method' to an operator obtained by a spectral decomposition of the partial Fourier transformĤ of H . Around each value of the spectrum (except the eigenvalues) including the thresholds, a conjugate operator may be constructed which ensures the 'good properties' of regularity for H . A limiting absorption principle is then obtained for a large class of operators at every point of the spectrum (except eigenvalues). If the point is a threshold, the limiting absorption principle is valid in a closed subspace of the usual one (namely L 2 s , with s¿ 1 2 ) and we are interested by the behaviour of R(z), z close to a threshold, applying in the usual space L 2 s , with s¿ 1 2 when z tends to the threshold.