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Margaret Thatcher's pronunciation: An exercise in ear-training

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

Luke Van Buuren
Luke Van Buuren
Affiliation:
Speech Unit, Department of English. University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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Extract

Ear training is an essential element in any phonetics or pronunciation teaching. In recent years I have been developing an ear-training method based on repeater tapes (each line repeated nine or ten times) of ‘unusual’ personalities and accents. The recordings are first transcribed by rule of thumb according to our own norm (RP English, Standard Dutch, etc.) and the idea is that the major differences from this norm are then listened to and analysed. If the observations are summarized at the end, one has a fair idea of what is characteristic of that particular type of speech. By way of illustration I shall present such a summary of 85 seconds of speech by The Rt Hon. Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, taken from an interview on Dutch television made in 1982. It will appear that we do not only analyse phonetic phenomena, but cannot help noticing in this case their semantic impact as well. Perhaps our observations may be of some interest to semanticists and psychologists as well as phoneticians.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the International Phonetic Association , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , July 1988 , pp. 26 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © Journal of the International Phonetic Association 1988

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