Studies of questions present strong evidence that there is no one-to-one relationship between intonation and interrogative mode. In this paper, we describe some aspects of prosodic variation in the Spontal corpus of 120 half-hour spontaneous dialogues in Swedish. The study is part of ongoing work aimed at extracting a database of 600 questions from the corpus, complete with categorization and prosodic descriptions. We report on coding and annotation of question typology and present results concerning prosodic correlates related to question type for 438 of the questions. A prosodically salient distinction was found between the two categories termed, in our typology, forward and backward looking questions.

Index Terms: speech prosody, spontaneous speech, question intonation, interrogative intonation