Since the early 70's quite a lot of attention has been paid to the forms andfunctions of prosody in discourse. This paper first reviews some key issuesregarding the phonetic, phonological and functional aspects of the suprasegmentalfeatures of speech. It then gives an overview of the prosody of Frenchand Dutch. Although more research is needed, this contrastive analysis provides abetter understanding of the prosodic structure of the two languages.
