Why Sentence Modality in Spontaneous Speech is

\You crazy," said Max. It was either a statement or a question. \So you're our man, then," he said. It was half statement, half question. ABSTRACT We show in this paper that the labeling of sentence modality in German, esp. of questions vs. non-questions, is more diicult 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.