Question types and some prosodic correlates in 600 questions in the Spontal database of Swedish dialogues

Abstract

Studies of questions present strong evidence that there is no one-to-one relationship between intonation and interrogative mode. We present initial steps of a larger project investigating and describing intonational variation in the Spontal database of 120 half-hour spontaneous dialogues in Swedish, and testing the hypothesis that the concept of a standard question intonation such as a final pitch rise contrasting a final low declarative intonation is not consistent with the pragmatic use of intonation in dialogue. We report on the extraction of 600 questions from the Spontal corpus, coding and annotation of question typology, and preliminary results concerning some prosodic correlates related to question type.