标准美语发音的13个秘诀 CD 2 Track 6

 

Grammar in a Nutshell                                                             CD 2 Track 6 

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know Ab out Grammar... But Were Afraid to Use English is a chronological¹ language. We just love to know when something happened, and this is indicated by the range and de pth of our verb tenses.  

I  had already seen it by the time she brought  it in. 

As you probably learned in your grammar studies, "the past perfect is an action in the past that occurred before a separate acti on in the past." Whew! Not all languages do this. For example, Japanese is fairly casual about when things happened, but bein g a hierarchical language, it is very important to know what  relationship the two people involved had.  A high-level person with  a low-level one, two peers², a man and a woman, al l these things show up in Japanese grammar. Grammatically speaking, English is democratic.  

The confusing part is that in English the verb tenses are very important, but instead of putting them up on the  peaks  of a sentence, we throw th em all deep down in the valleys ! Therefore, two sentences with strong  intonation—such as, " Dogs eat  bones"   and "The  dogs 'll've eaten the bones"   sound amazingly similar. Why? Because it takes the same amount of time to say both sentences since they have the same number of st resses. The three original words and the rhythm stay the same in these sentences, but the meaning changes as  you add more stressed words. Articles and verb tense changes are usually not stressed. 

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Now let's see how this works in the exercises that follow. 

1 chronological   

adj.按年月顺序排列的，年代学的

参考例句：

• The paintings are exhibited in chronological sequence.这些画是按创作的时间顺序展出的。
• Give me the dates in chronological order.把日期按年月顺序给我。

2 peers   

n.同等的人，贵族vi.凝视，窥视vt.与…同等，封为贵族v.凝视( peer的第三人称单数 )；盯着看；同等；比得上

参考例句：

• She enjoys the respect of her peers. 她受到同侪的尊敬。
• She peers into my eyes. 她盯着我的眼睛。 来自《简明英汉词典》