(no subject)
I spent most of today in the forgiving darkness of an edit suite. While I was going through my rushes, something about the way I interview people suddenly struck me for the first time. When you are doing telly, you want people to answer your questions in full sentences, so that you can use them in a VT with minimum set-up. It's like a French comprehension exercise at school. You want to avoid a situation like this:
Q. What's your name?
A. Warwick.
This is hard to cut with. To get around this problem, I tend to ask people two questions at once, which for some reason compels them to answer in full sentences:
Q. What's your name, and where are you from?
A. I'm called Warwick and I'm from London.
I was listening to something like this on tape today, and I suddenly thought: why does this work? Somehow, if it's just one question, it "feels" grammatically complete to just give a one-word answer. But it would be very unnatural for someone to answer "Warwick; London" to the second question - in that case, you automatically re-structure your sentence. I feel that this is telling me something about one of those neuro-linguistic arguments which I always forget about four seconds after putting down a Steven Pinker book.