ABSTRACT
As far as possible, the texts selected for the corpus were spoken in received pronunciation (RP). This was relatively easy where material from the BBC programmes From our own Correspondent and the News was concerned, as the BBC themselves make similar requirements of their presenters of news or news commentary programmes. Most of the speakers in the corpus have accents reasonably close to RP – even if, in some cases, the concept of ‘RP’ has been interpreted rather widely – and those with particularly strong regional accents were excluded.
