8 The CLOTH Lexical Set
The cloth lexical set is part of the group of Checked vowels that is only capable of being in stressed syllables. Because it is Checked, it can only exist when it is followed by a consonant. In fact, cloth must be followed by specific consonants, otherwise the vowel is likely to be part of lot. For example, the word cloth is a part of cloth (of course it is!) because it ends in the ‹th›-sound, the voiceless dental fricative /θ/, while clot is part of lot because it ends in /t/, the voiceless alveolar stop. The consonant that follows the vowel is the determining factor, and I’ll lay out the environments that make that so when we discuss Spellings below.
cloth is a Lexical Set that behaves rather strangely, as it never has its own vowel sound: it always shares with either the lot or thought Lexical Sets.
There are many options for mergers in the open-back region of the vowel space, so overlaps can be quite complex. For example, you might have a lot/cloth/thought/north/force merger alongside a bath/palm/start merger in some parts of Australia; you might get a cloth/thought merger with a lot/palm merger in several regions of the United States.
cloth behaves differently in different accents. In the UK, cloth is more commonly merged with lot today; historically, it was more likely to be merged with thought (which is also merged with north/force.) This merger was frequently associated with traditional Received Pronunciation (RP); as that “high status” accent becomes less fashionable, and as older speakers die off, cloth words become less noticeable, as they are blending in with lot. Meanwhile, in the US, cloth is frequently merged with thought and has a larger inventory of words that are part of the set.
As we have seen in other Lexical Sets, cloth is broken into 3 subgroupings. Groups Ⓐ and Ⓑ are followed by similar, but not always identical consonants; the words that belong to one group over the other can seem somewhat arbitrary. Meanwhile, Group Ⓒ has its vowel preceding /r/ before another vowel. Different accents have different ways of implementing the various subgroupings. For example—
In Traditional RP:
- Group Ⓐ is merged with thought;
- Groups Ⓑ & Ⓒ are merged with lot.
In some accents in the US, such as so-called General American:
- Groups Ⓐ & Ⓑ are merged with thought;
- Group Ⓒ is split, so that some words are merged with start while others are merged with north/force.
In Canada:
- Groups Ⓐ & Ⓑ are merged with palm/lot
- Group Ⓒ has all words spelled ‹or/orr› merged with north/force.
If you have a merger of two or more Lexical Sets, you’ll need to memorize the most common instances of the set (or even just a subgroup), and the environments in which they are found, as figuring out where these words belong is non-obvious. For example, many words in Group Ⓑ are similar in their spelling to words in Group Ⓐ, and so need to be memorized. For example, why are broth, cross, Austin in Group Ⓐ, while moth, boss, sausage are in