We witnessed remarkably rapid development of the linguistic study of intonation during the last 25 years or so. Two main factors that seemed to enabled this development were analyzed in the first half of the paper, namely, progresses in the generative grammatical treatment of intonation, and, development of digital speech processing technology. The last half of the paper was devoted to the discussion of current issues that requires further investigation; these include classification of paralinguistic information, definition of accentual phrase in Japanese, classification of phrase-final intonation contours, intonation of dialects, phonetic features other than the F0 that contribute to the perception of intonation, and, issues related to the techniques of digital speech analysis.
