An English schoolboy would only ask his friend: "Wassa time, then?" To his teacher he would be much more likely to speak in a mo

admin2010-05-09  17

问题     An English schoolboy would only ask his friend: "Wassa time, then?" To his teacher he would be much more likely to speak in a more standardized accent and ask: "Excuse me, sir, may I have the correct time please?" People are generally aware that the phrases and expressions they use are different from those of earlier generations; but they concede less that their own behavior also varies according to the situation in which they find themselves. People have characteristic ways of talking, which are relatively stable across varying situations. Nevertheless, distinct contexts, and different listeners, demand different patterns of speech from one and the same speaker.
    Not only this, but, in many cases, the way someone speaks affects the response of the person to whom he is speaking in such a way that "modeling" is seen to occur. This is what Michael Argyle has called "response matching". Several studies have shown that the more intimate these details are, the more personal secrets the other person will divulge (泄露).
    Response matching has, in fact, been noted between two speakers in a number of ways, including how long someone speaks, the length of pauses, speech rate and voice loudness. The correspondence between the length of reporters’ questions when interviewing President Kennedy, and the length of his replies has been shown to have increased over the duration of his 1961-1963 news conferences. Argyle says this process may be one of "imitation". Two American researchers, Jaffe and Feldstein, prefer to think of it as the speaker’s need for equilibrium (平衡). Neither of these explanations seems particularly convincing. It may be that response matching can be more profitably considered as an unconscious reflection of speakers’ needs for social integration with one another.
    This process of modeling the other person’s speech in a conversation could also be termed "speech convergence". It may only be one aspect of a much wider speech change. In other situations, speech divergence may occur when certain factors encourage a person to modify his speech away from the individual he is dealing with. For example, a retired brigadier’s wife, renowned for her incessant snobbishness, may return her vehicle to the local garage because of inadequate servicing, voicing her complaint in elaborately phrased, yet mechanically unsophisticated language, with a high soft-pitched voice. These superior airs and graces may simply make the mechanic reply with a flourish of almost incomprehensible technicalities, and in a louder, more deeply-pitched voice than he would have used with a less irritating customer.
What does the example of the English schoolboy in Paragraph 1 indicate?

选项 A、Nowadays, English schoolboys are impolite toward people except towards their teachers.
B、The way of asking time is different from that of earlier generations.
C、People’s speaking styles vary according to different situations.
D、People’s ways of speaking are relatively stable on varying occasions.

答案C

解析 推论题 第一段提到即使是表达同样的意思,在不同场合人们也会使用不同的表达方式,这是语言交际的一个重要部分,而作者开头举的例子正是说明了这一点。参考第一段最后一句。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/kaOK777K
0

最新回复(0)