Any spaces

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

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'...


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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