Saturday 31 August 2013

Any spaces

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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31 August

A debate arose about the use of the question-mark this lunchtime, except that it was only a debate in the modern sense : I received an explanation of how many screens, if one had been driving when sending Any spaces as a message, one would have had to go through to add the punctuation, whereas I had pointed out that the pithiness of some of the messages sent had bordered on abruptness.

As to a question-mark, clearly it had to be a question - although, had it started with a lower-case letter (some friends never use capitals), one might have wondered whether it was the tail-fragment - and clearly one also inferred the missing Are there.

Which brought us to what happens when a proposition is not, as almost in that case (it would actually have been Are there spaces ?), turned into a question by inversion, but by intonation :


You are coming as statement

You are coming ! as a form of imperative

You are coming ? as a question

Are you coming ? also as a question


Likewise :

You want that as statement

You want that ? as a form of derision in a question

You want that ? possibly, again, as a form of derision in a question, possibly not

You want that ? as a form of uncertainty, perhaps

Etc., etc. with several words stressed...


But :

Do you want that ? as a question

Do you want that ? as an intensified question

Do you want that ? as another intensified question

Do you want that ? as a third intensified question

Etc., etc. with several words stressed...


Questions, we take them for granted, but forming them can - rightly or wrongly - impart all sorts of meaning, without even considering adding another intensifying word such as 'really'...




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

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