The so-called Principle of Inherency in Dutch linguistics offers an explanation for the obligatory position of a certain number of constituents immediately before the verbal remainder. The goal of this contribution is to provide an answer to the question whether this principle has validity in French as well. Through a – necessarily partial — contrastive description of the complement of direction in contemporary Dutch and French, we show that this principle is inoperable in French. We hypothesize that the observed divergence is related to the supra-segmental level of the two languages. Dutch is characterized by a non-contrastive and mobile sentence accent, and thus has a ‘flexible’ pragmatic structure, whereas French, which lacks a sentence accent, has a word-group accent which triggers a ‘strict’ pragmatic structure. Consequently, the Principle of Inherence, based on a fixed position, has full latitude to be realized in Dutch, unlike French.