时间:2019-01-25 作者:英语课 分类:词汇大师(Wordmaster)


英语课

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER -- we take some of the stress out of learning which words to stress in American English.


RS: We turn to Lida [lee-da] Baker 1. She's an instructor 2 at the American Language Center at the University of California at Los Angeles. She says the basic rule when speaking is to put emphasis on what she calls "content words" like nouns and verbs -- the words that convey information.


TAPE: CUT ONE -- BAKER/ARDITTI


BAKER: "Words that are part of the grammatical structure of the language tend to be unstressed. So words like articles and prepositions and pronouns. So let me give you an example, if I say something like 'I have to go to the store,' the most prominent word in that sentence is the word 'store.' It's a noun. It's also stressed because it is the last content word of the sentence. One of the normal patterns of American English is that you stress the last content word, the last information-conveying word, of the sentence. Now in contrast to that, let's look at the words that are not stressed. The very first word is a pronoun. 'I' tends to be unstressed. The next two words, 'have to,' if we were to write those words out, we would write 'have to.' In conversation we run them together and we pronounce them very quickly, and we say 'hafta.'"


AA: "Like h-a-f-t-a."


BAKER: "Exactly."


AA: "And that's perfectly 3 acceptable."


BAKER: "It's more than acceptable, it's required. This is what native speakers of English do. And by the way, a lot of people all over the world learn English by reading. They memorize lists of vocabulary and they're tested on their reading skills and so on. Well, when I get them in my classroom and they're in an English-speaking country for the first time in their lives, and they're hearing the language all around them, they don't understand a word. And one of the reasons they can't understand the spoken language is that they're not familiar with this alternating stress and unstressed pattern."


RS: As Lida Baker explained, the word you choose to stress also lets you change the focus of a sentence in order to convey a specific meaning.


TAPE: CUT THREE -- BAKER/ARDITTI


BAKER: "Let's take a simple sentence like this: 'I put my red hat away.' Now what was the focus word in that phrase?"


AA: "Hat."


BAKER: "Right, because 'hat' is the last content word of the sentence. So if you were to ask me, 'what did you put away?' I would answer you, 'I put my red hat away.' But what if I say it like this, 'I put my red hat AWAY.' What question is that answering?"


ARDITT: "What did you do with your red hat?"


BAKER: "Or 'where did you put your red hat,' right? Now what if I say it like this, 'EYE put my red hat away.' What question is that answering?"


AA: "Who put your red hat away."


BAKER: "That's right. Let's move the focus one more time and say it like this, 'I put MY red hat away' ... 'I put MY red hat away.'"


AA: "As opposed to someone else's."


BAKER: "Right, so we can voluntarily focus on any word in the sentence that we want to in order to convey a specific meaning."


AA: "And, in fact, if you're not familiar with the sort of natural patterns and you stress the wrong words, you might end up confusing the listener."


BAKER: "That's exactly the point. As a matter of fact, people who are learning English have a tendency, for example, to stress pronouns. For them the normal stress pattern that they employ would be 'EYE put my red hat away.' And to a native speaker of English, as you say, that would be very confusing, because they would be wondering 'well, why are you stressing the pronoun there?'"


AA: One way Lida Baker helps her students learn normal speech patterns is by listening to music and singing along. She says music also helps people remember things.


RS: She plays classic songs, like one that Julie Andrews made famous in the movie soundtrack to "My Fair Lady."


TAPE: CUT THREE -- BAKER


"'The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly in the Plain' is a great example of a normal speech pattern. It's divided into two thought groups, 'the rain in Spain,' 'falls mainly in the plain.' Each thought group has a focus word -- in fact it has two focus words, rain/Spain, mainly/plain. And the function words -- the prepositions and the articles and so on -- are not stressed, and so they're what we call reduced. They're pronounced at a lower pitch, they're pronounced quickly ...


MUSIC: "The Rain in Spain"


RS: If you have a question for Lida Baker at UCLA's American Language Center, send it to us -- she might be able to answer it on the air.


AA: Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com or write to VOA Wordmaster, Washington, DC 20237 USA. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.


MUSIC: "The Rain in Spain"



n.面包师
  • The baker bakes his bread in the bakery.面包师在面包房内烤面包。
  • The baker frosted the cake with a mixture of sugar and whites of eggs.面包师在蛋糕上撒了一层白糖和蛋清的混合料。
n.指导者,教员,教练
  • The college jumped him from instructor to full professor.大学突然把他从讲师提升为正教授。
  • The skiing instructor was a tall,sunburnt man.滑雪教练是一个高高个子晒得黑黑的男子。
adv.完美地,无可非议地,彻底地
  • The witnesses were each perfectly certain of what they said.证人们个个对自己所说的话十分肯定。
  • Everything that we're doing is all perfectly above board.我们做的每件事情都是光明正大的。
学英语单词
abscess of sclera
additional fuel
Allis' sign
artophorion
automatic gear gauge
back-rake
be necessary to
beer barrel
bellows camera
Bercianos
bias crosstalk
boese
captive bolt
car repair facilities
catalyst spraying
channel integrity
chicken yards
clusterfuck
common whipping
control
cowfishes
cupric oleate
digital tape
ease nature
ecotechnologies
effective strength
eireanns
Eldama Ravine
experimental aerodonetics
external priority discipline
Fick's equation
flares up
floating-rate
gigga
gunmetals
Gunn amplifier
Hilbert-Schmidt expansion theorem
horizontal synchronizing device
internal defect
Ivancice
jankauskas
Juojarvi
kammenar
kop (kick-off point)
Larouco, Sa.do
laydays
localization of industry
lymphonodi submandibulares
mains unit
man at the wheel
mangole
measurement-system data handling
Meconopsis paniculata
meiosis zygotene stage
Merecure Viejo
micro-rhythm
middle-clicked
moisture-laden air
mud trap
mull something over
musulman
myns
neutral variation
nutation drive
oligophylicidine
ozonophore
pandurated
pedestal wash basin
peliosis
pelvic inflammatory disease
phyllostomidaes
polypnoea
post-injury
pseudohypersensitivity
pudding-grass
Ranunculus banguoensis
re-imburse
read access time
regeneration connection
revelations
Rubus grandipaniculatus
salty dog
shape-righting
sheet gauge
simulation of logic array
skewed storage
sne
sodium tetrabromphenolphthalein
Spessart
string tape
synchro clutch
techs
ties of matter
time limit for a project
timmiella anomala
transient overvoltage
treddle
trilobum
unlusthead
urethral gonorrhea
vinhos verdes
Woolpit