标准美语发音的13个秘诀 CD 1 Track 40

Set Phrases                                          CD 1 Track 40 

A Cultural Indoctrinati on to American Norms 

When I learned the alphabet as a child, I heard it before I saw it. I  heard that the last four letters were dubba-you, ex, why, zee. I thought that  dubbayou was a long, strange name for a letter, but I didn't question it any  more than I did aitch.  It was just a name. Many years later,  it struck me that it was a  double U. Of course, a W is really UU. I had such a funny feeling, though, when I realized that something I had  taken for granted for so many years had a background meaning that I had completel y overlooked. This "funn y feelin g" is exactl y what most native s peakers  get when a two-word phrase is  stressed on the wrong word. When two individual words go through the cultural process of becoming a se t phrase, the original sense of  each word is more or less forgotten and the new meaning completely  takes over. When we hear the word  pain killer 1,  we think  anesthetic.  If, however, someone says  pain killer,  it brings up the strength and almost unrelated meaning of  kill.  

When you have a two-word phrase, you have to either stress on the first word, or on the second word. If you st ress both or neither, it's not clear what you are trying to say. Stress on the first word is more noticeable and one of the  most important concepts of intonation 2 that you are going to study. At first glance, it doesn't seem significant, but the more you look at this concept, the more you are going to realize  that it reflects how we Americans think, what concepts we have adopted as our own, an d what things we consider important.  

Set phrases are our "cultural icons," or word images;  they are indicators 3 of a  determined use that  we have internalized. These set phrases, with stress on the first word, have been taken into everyday English from descriptive phrases, with  stress on the second word. As soon as a descriptive phrase becomes a set phras e, the emphasis shifts from the  second word to the  first. The original sense of each word is more or less forgotten and the new meaning takes over.  

Set phrases indicate that we have internalized this phrase as an  image,  that we all agree on a concrete idea that this phrase represents. A  hundred years or so ago, when Levi Strauss first came out with his denim 5 pants,  they were described as  blue  jeans.  Now that we all agree on the image, however, they are  blue  jeans.  

A more recent example would  be the descriptive phrase,  He 's a real party animal. This slang expression refers to someone who has a great time at a party. When it first became popular, the people using it needed to explain (with their intonation)  that he was an  animal at a  party.  As time passed, the expression became cliche 6  and we changed the intonation to  He's a real  partyanima l  because "everyone knew" what it meant. 

Cliches are hard to recognize in a new language because what may be an old and tiredexpression to a native speaker  may be fresh and exciting to a newcomer. One way to look at English from the inside out, rather than always  looking from the outside  in, is to get a feel for what Americans have already accepted and intern 4 alized. This starts ou t as a purely 7 language phenomenon, but you will notice that as you pr ogress and undergo the relentless 8 cultural indoctrination of standard intonation patterns, you will find yourse lf expressing yourself with the language cues and signals that will ma rk you as an insider—not an outsider. 

When the interpreter was translating for the former Russian President Gorbachev about his trip to San Francisco in 1990, his pronunciation was  good, but he placed himself on the outside by repeatedly saying,  cable  car.  The phrase  cable car  is an image, an established entity 9, and it was very noticeable to hear it stressed on th e second word as a mere 10 description.  

An important point that  I would like to make is that the "r ules" you are given here are not meant to be memorized. This discussion is only an  introduction to give you a starting point in understanding this phenomenon and in  recognizing what to listen for. Read it over; think about it; then listen, try it out, listen some more, and try it out again.  

As you become familiar with int onation, you will become more comfortable with American norms, thus the cultural orientation 11, or even cultural indoctrination,  aspect of the following examples. 

Note When you get the impression that a two-word description could be hy phenated or even made into one word, it is a signal that it  could be a set phrase—for example,  flash  light,  flash-light, flash light. Also, stress the first word with Street (Main Street) and nationalities of food and people ( Mexican food,  Chinese girls).