The present paper tries to analyse the correlation between the clause type of an utterance and the intonational features associated to it. The main objectives of this study are to describe and analyse the intonation patterns in Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth MSA) and Standard English (henceforth SE) depending on grammatical bases in a contrastive way. It is hypothesized that the two languages (henceforth MSA and SE) differ from each other in terms of both the clause structure and the intonational features associated to it. It is found that the intonational differences are more effective than the syntactic ones. It is also found that MSA and SE use almost all the types of tones established by Halliday (1970), and that the choice of intonation patterns is mainly and fundamentally determined by grammatical factors