Here are some examples. These are taken from dance instruction manuals or pamphlets available on the Library of Congress website. I have compiled a set of links that makes access to pages with music much easier: these are in an appendix to this PDF essay: link.
The first two pieces come from a [short treatise] published in the early 1780s, in which the author, a dancer named Alexis Bacquoy-Guedon, offers what amounts to a historical account of dance measures. The first piece below is called "Air" but is obviously a gavotte. The second is labeled "Contredanse." Both use the older (that is, seventeenth-century) notation in alla breve time (2/2 meter), treat quarter notes as diminutions, and consistently mark the phrases in the manner of the gavotte. Notice that in both cases the main theme is a clearly marked period, and the contrasting theme is a sentence.
In the early eighteenth century, as part of a broad shift away from the half note to the quarter note as the beat basis, gavottes were sometimes notated in common time (4/4), but the next two dances show a more radical change that was commonplace after mid-century: writing the gavotte in 2/4 time. (See examples in Haydn and Mozart finales in my [article] on the contredanse: such finales are essentially "sped-up" and stylized gavotte-contredanses.) The two scores below come from a [bound collection of contredanses] from the 1760s (probably originally published individually in serial fashion as folios or chapbooks). Of the four eight-bar strains in [La Mienne], the first three are periods, and the last is a sentence. Properly, bars 9-16 would have to be called a period with a failed consequent because of the half cadence. Both strains of [La Victorieuse] are periods.
