Studies on French intonation are quite diversified, to the point where, looking at the descriptive results, one might wonder if all researchers did analyze the same language. Remarkable prosodic characteristics found in one study are not retrieved in another, and different theoretical approaches give very different insights on data, despite very similar experimental material.

In this paper we attempt to highlight some converging aspects of two types of intonation linguistic description on French, developed one in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework and the other with a phonosyntactic point of view. In particular, the contrast of melodic slope may be totally hidden with one approach, and appear as the main characteristic of French intonation with the other.