Thursday, September 04, 2008

Curiouser and curiouser

I'm on the run and can't chase down details now, but Anonymous just posted this comment about Palin's accent, worth really highlighting:
I just went and listened to some older interviews - they sounded completely western, no real accent at all.

Seems she picked up a little Minnesota while in the neighborhood ...
Seriously? That would be wild. So, it comes down to her versus Pawlenty for Veep and she offers to throw in a fake Minnesota accent to sweeten the deal? I know all about accent REDUCTION, but an adult accent IMPLANT?

By the way, Joe says he didn't have time to link the sound file and track down the time on the Palin quote, but that it's fairly early on.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just a quick observation. The furor over Palin's speech is based in large part on a read text, in performance mode, etc., etc., etc. Labov, Bell and countless others have highlighted that, while not inauthentic speech, read and staged speech is governed by certain performance feedback mechanisms. I think the sociophonetics community could do us all a favor and analyze Palin's answers to questions by media, before she was even considered for nomination, in particular when being asked questions about fairly benign governmental issues by reporters she's familiar with in Alaska.

Mr. Verb said...

Anon: Yeah, that would be interesting. I actually spent a little time yesterday looking for old video of her and wasn't finding anything. That was a crude search, though, and the stuff is surely out there.