Why sentence modality in spontaneous speech is more difficult to classify and why this fact is not too bad for prosody

Abstract

We show in this paper that the labeling of sentence modality in German, esp. of questions vs. non-questions, is more difficult for spontaneous than for read speech and easier for non-elliptic than for elliptic utterances. However, the prosodic marking of sentence modality is more important in elliptic utterances that occur more often in spontaneous speech.