Intonation in governed by independent units. However the coherence of communication processing involve the existence of rendezvous between intonation and other linguistic structures. These rendez-vous are used in a top-down modelization of intonation. Phonetic prototypes of intonation (stored in an hierarchical lexicon) are associated to linguistic and para-linguistic attributes. This global approach was applied on different languages. Some general results of application of this method are presented where prototypes clearly appear.