Lexical Set - Wells Standard Lexical Sets For English - Uses

Uses

The Standard Lexical Sets of Wells are widely used to discuss the phonological and phonetic systems of different accents of English in a clear and concise manner. Although based solely on RP and GenAm, the Standard Lexical Sets have proven useful in describing many other accents of English. This is true because, in many dialects, the words in all or most of the sets are pronounced with similar or identical stressed vowels. Wells himself uses the Lexical Sets most prominently to give "tables of lexical incidence" for all the various accents he discusses in his work. For example, here is the table of lexical incidence he gives for Newfoundland English:

The table indicates that, for example, Newfoundland English uses the /ɪ/ phoneme for words in the KIT lexical set, and that the NORTH, FORCE and CURE sets are all pronounced with the same vowel /ɔ̈r/. Note that some lexical sets, such as FACE, are given with more than one pronunciation: this indicates that not all words in the FACE lexical set are pronounced similarly (in this case because Newfoundland English has not fully undergone the pane–pain merger). (Note that in 1982 Wells used an older version of the International Phonetic Alphabet which lacked many of the independent symbols for central vowels. 1982 /ɔ̈/ was the open-mid central rounded vowel, which today is /ɞ/.)

Wells also uses the Standard Lexical Sets to refer to "the vowel sound used for the standard lexical set in question in the accent under discussion": Thus, for example, in describing the Newfoundland accent, Wells writes that "KIT and DRESS are reportedly often merged as ", meaning that the stressed syllables of words in the KIT lexical set and words in the DRESS lexical set are reportedly often pronounced identically with the vowel .

Lexical sets may also be used to describe splits and mergers. For example, RP, along with most non-rhotic accents, pronounces words such as "father" and "farther" identically. This can be described more economically as the merger of the PALM and START lexical sets. Most North American accents make "father" rhyme with "bother". This can be described as the merger of the PALM and LOT lexical sets.