CONCEPTMind Your FutureInteractive pronunciation book
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CONCEPTMind Your FutureThese are the symbols you will see in a dictionary. Click any one to hear it. You do not need to memorize them.
English has two kinds of verb that look identical on the page and behave differently when you say them.
Turn it OFF. The small word takes the stress. She looked at the REport. The small word does not.
If you stress the wrong one, nothing breaks, but the sentence sounds subtly foreign in a way that is very common and very fixable. And because phrasal verbs are everywhere in spoken professional English, the error repeats constantly.
Most languages do not have this pattern, so it is new rather than wrong.
The usual instinct is to treat all small words as unstressed, which is a good instinct, because unit 28 will tell you that function words are weak. But particles in phrasal verbs are the exception, and they behave like content words.
If your language uses prefixes where English uses particles, German being the clearest example, the pattern may feel familiar in structure but not in stress.
The rule. In a phrasal verb, the particle carries the stress. In a prepositional verb, the preposition does not.
How to tell them apart. If you can put an object between the verb and the small word, it is a phrasal verb and the small word is stressed.
Turn the light off works, so off is stressed. She looked the report at does not work, so at is unstressed.
The picture: in a phrasal verb, the particle is part of the meaning, so it earns a beat. In a prepositional verb, the preposition is just plumbing.
Then take five phrasal verbs you use at work and check you are stressing the particle.
The object test: if you can put an object between the verb and the small word, it is a phrasal verb and the small word is stressed. Turn the light off works, so off is stressed.
Play each line and notice where the stress falls and how the melody moves. Pick one to record and compare your own delivery.
Pick anything above, then record yourself saying it. Your recording appears in red over the model in gray. You are comparing shapes, not chasing a score.
How do you know whether to stress the small word in look it up and look at it?