The analysis of prosodic patterns in French spontaneous speech, which is presented here, is based on the hypothesis that intonation, far from being the reflection of syntactical organisation only, also depends on its informative structure. This hypothesis is illustrated here by the role of prosodic markedness in the expression of topic. Two levels of constraints have been taken into account: (i) the first one concerns the perceptual modelisation of prosodic parameters and their phonological representation in terms of autonomous principles, (ii) the second one is focused on the functional interpretation of the syntactical and information structures.