Monday 4 April 2022

Foreshadowing via conjunction

There is a film called Willy's Wonderland, starring Nicolas Cage, and it is bizarre and wonderful. You should watch it. Cage has to spend the night in a disused family amusement animatronic kids' party type place, working as a cleaner in order to pay off the bill for fixing his car. The man who makes this deal with him says something along the lines of, 

'You walk out of that building in the morning and I'll have your car waiting for you.'

I've written before about conjunctions ('and') working as a conditional, in my post about the instruction(?) Don't touch the actors and they won't touch you. There, I noted that you could interpret the whole sentence as a statement of fact, that you shouldn't touch the actors and, independently, they also will not touch you, but that in fact we interpret it as a conditional: if you don't touch the actors, they won't touch you. 

In the line from this film, the same is true. Either the man was saying to Nicolas Cage that he'd be able to leave in the morning and when he did so his car would be ready, or, very much foreshadowing what was to come, that there is a possibility that he might not walk out in the morning but that if he did, his car would be waiting. 

I felt like the intonation gives us a clue as to which it is, but I lack the technical skills to show you how it goes on this blog. It's something like this, though: in the conditional interpretation, we get rising intonation to the end of the first clause and then falling on the second one, whereas on the statement of facts interpretation, they're both falling, and similar to each other. 

(Yes, this could also be a threat, as noted in that other post as well. Context would have made that really weird – who offers to fix your car as a threat?)

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