Лексикалық топтар және дыбыстамалық ерекшеліктер

Group of words that fall under a single category

A lexical set is a group of words that share a particular phonological feature. A phoneme is a basic unit of sound in a language that can distinguish one word from another. Most commonly, following the work of phonetician John C. Wells, a lexical set is a class of words in a language that share a certain vowel phoneme. As Wells himself says, lexical sets "enable one to refer concisely to large groups of words which tend to share the same vowel, and to the vowel which they share". For instance, the pronunciation of the vowel in cup, luck, sun, blood, glove, and tough may vary in different English dialects but is usually consistent within each dialect and so the category of words forms a lexical set, which Wells, for ease, calls the set. Meanwhile, words like bid, cliff, limb, miss, etc. form a separate lexical set: Wells's set. Originally, Wells developed 24 such labels—keywords—for the vowel lexical sets of English, which have been sometimes modified and expanded by himself or other scholars for various reasons. Lexical sets have also been used to describe the vowels of other languages, such as French, Irish and Scots. There are several reasons why lexical sets are useful. Scholars of phonetics often use abstract symbols (most universally today, those of the International Phonetic Alphabet) to transcribe phonemes, but they may follow different transcribing conventions or rely on implicit assumptions in their exact choice of symbols. One convenience of lexical sets is their tendency to avoid these conventions or assumptions. Instead, Wells explains, they "make use of keywords intended to be unmistakable no matter what accent one says them in". That makes them useful for examining phonemes within an accent, comparing and contrasting different accents, and capturing how phonemes may be differently distributed based on accent. A further benefit is that people with no background in phonetics can identify a phoneme not by learned symbols or technical jargon but by its simple keyword (like or in the above examples). He also wrote that he claimed no copyright in the standard lexical sets, and that everyone was "free to make whatever use of them they wish". Some writers on English accents have introduced a set to refer to a set of words that have the vowel in standard accents but may have a different vowel in Sheffield or in south east London. Wells has stated that he didn't include a set because this should be interpreted as an allophone of that is sensitive to the morpheme boundary, which he illustrates by comparing the London pronunciations of goalie and slowly. , which documents the phonologies of varieties of English around the world like , employs Wells's standard lexical sets as well as the following supplementary lexical sets, as needed to illustrate finer details of the variety under discussion:
, discussed above
hors, offics, paintd and villge, all referring to the unstressed allophone of that is subject to the weak vowel merger
, and , for the allophones of ( in non rhotic dialects), and before intervocalic , commonly subject to Mary–marry–merry merger in North American English
and , for the allophones of and before intervocalic , commonly subject to mirror–nearer merger in North American English
treac and unc, both referring to the vocalized
Other supplementary lexical sets include:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , met, , , , , , , , carr, cord, crious, , , bout, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
There is also the set, which is the same as Wells's .

In his work for the Survey of Anglo Welsh Dialects, David Parry adapted Wells's lexical sets for Anglo Welsh dialects. + Lexical sets, as defined in Keyword Example words bitch, bridge, finger, shilling, squirrel, thimble, whip, with buried, deaf, kettle, second, twelve, yellow apples, hand, ladder, lamb, man, rabbits, rat, saddle, that, thatch butter, furrow, jump, none, nothing, one, onions, suck, uncle cross, dog, fox, holly, off, porridge, quarry, trough, wash, wasps, wrong bull, butcher, foot, put, sugar, woman, wool cheese, geese, grease, key, pea, sheaf, sheep, weasel, weeds, wheel, yeast bacon, break, clay, drain, gate, lay (verb), potatoes, spade, tail, take, waistcoat, weigh first, heard, third, work (noun) chair, hare, mare, pears arm, branch, calf, chaff, draught, farmer, farthing, grass forks, morning, saw dust, slaughter house, straw, walk coal, cold, colt, comb, foal, oak, old, road, sholder, snow, spokes, toad, yolk dew, ewe, goose, hoof, root, stool, tooth, Tuesday, two eye, fight, flies (noun, plural), hive, ivy, mice, white boiling, oil, voice cow, plough, snout, sow (noun), thousand ears, hear, year boar, door, four fire, iron flour, hour