ESCA Workshop on Prosody Lund, Sweden September 27-29, 1993

Why Sentence Modality in Spontaneous Speech is More Difficult to Classify and why this Fact is not too bad for Prosody

Anton Batliner (1), C. Weiand (1), Andreas Kießling (2), Elmar Nöth (2)

(1) L.M.-Universität München, Institut für Deutsche Philologie, München, Germany
(2) Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Lehrstuhl für Mustererkennung (Informatik 5), Erlangen, Germany

"You crazy," said Max. It was either a statement or a question. (John le Carre: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)

"So you're our man, then," he said. It was half statement, half question. (Josef Skvorecky: The Engineer of Human Souls)

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.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Batliner, Anton / Weiand, C. / Kießling, Andreas / Nöth, Elmar (1993): "Why sentence modality in spontaneous speech is more difficult to classify and why this fact is not too bad for prosody", In Prosody-1993, 112-115.