convey emphasis, urgency or impatience. It can also be a reply to a real, imagined, or pre-emptively-answered disagreement, hesitation, or wrong assumption on the part of the listener or other people. In other situations, it can have different effects. Conversely, doch can also express doubt and in writing, the affirmative and the doubtful meanings may be ambiguous and depend on context. In speech, the different meanings of doch can be told apart by different types emphasis: Gehst Du nicht nach Hause? Doch, ich gehe gleich. ("Are you not going home?" "Oh, yes, I am going in a moment".) (Affirmation of a negative question; obligatory.) Komm doch her! ("Do come here!") (Emphatically) Komm doch endlich her! ("Do come on! Get a move on!") (More emphatically and impatiently) Ich habe dir doch gesagt, dass es nicht so ist. ("I did tell you that it isn't like that." or "I told you it isn't like that, didn't I?") Ich kenne mich in Berlin aus. Ich war doch letztes Jahr dort. ("I know my way around Berlin. I was here last year, after all/as a matter of fact.") In that way, doch can be similar to stressed schon ("indeed"), but stressed schon implies an actual qualification of the statement, which is often made explicit by a phrase with aber ("but"): Ich war schon auf der Party, aber Spaß hatte ich nicht. ("I was indeed at the party, but I did not enjoy myself.") That should not be confused with the adverbial meaning of the unstressed schon, "already". However, at least in writing, schon "already" must be either made unmistakable by the context, such as by additional adverbs, or replaced by its equivalent, bereits: Ich war schon (/bereits) auf der Party, aber Spaß hatte ich (noch) nicht. ("I was already at the party, but I had not (yet) been enjoying myself.") In other contexts, doch indicates that the action described in the sentence is unlikely to occur: Du bist also doch gekommen! ("You came after all.") Ich sehe nicht viel fern, aber wenn etwas Gutes kommt, schalte ich doch ein. ("I don't watch much TV, but I do tune in if something good comes on.") Gar is used to intensify a statement, the completeness or a total lack of something: Ich besitze gar kein Auto. ("I'm afraid I have no car [at all].") At the beginning of a sentence, especially in literary contexts, gar sometimes