标准美语发音的13个秘诀 CD 2 Track 6

（单词翻译）

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. 

图片1

图片2

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