A recurrent issue in the study of intonation relates to whether contours should be treated as gestalts or composites of independent elements. We contribute to this debate by examining a corpus of wh-questions (N = 2135) which were elicited from 18 Greek speakers using a discourse completion task (DCT). DCTs involved two scenarios that participants heard and saw on screen: Scenario A presented a situation ending with an information-seeking question; Scenario B presented a situation in which the wh-question was used as an implicit statement. We used functional principal component analysis (FPCA), a data-driven, dimension-reduction method to analyse the pitch contours. In FPCA curves are modelled as B-splines and based on this modelling FPCA returns the dominant modes of curve variation called Principal Components (PCs). By definition, each PC presents an independent mode of variation. Thus, if curve changes associated with the tonal elements posited by AM are captured by different PCs, this is evidence that these elements are independent of each other which supports compositionality. This is confirmed in our analysis.