Since two decades at least, intonation phonology is almost exclusively dominated by the Autosegmental-Metrical model, which appears universally appropriate to describe sentence intonation in most languages. However, careful examination of the AM limitations and drawbacks may question this universality, leading way to improve and possibly modify key properties of this theoretical approach, at least for languages such as French.

Index Terms: sentence intonation, autosegmental-metrical, ToBI, prosodic structure, French.