9 The FLEECE Lexical Set
The fleece lexical set is perhaps one of the most consistent in terms of its pronunciation, as it has very little variation across accents of English, occurring in words with the stressed vowel “ee,” or /i/. The vowel in fleece, sometimes called the “Long E” is Free, so it can occur with no following consonant as we get in words like free, ski, tea, and is always stressed in its dictionary form. In the British tradition where Free vowels are marked as “long vowels,” it is often transcribed phonemically as /iː/. In the American tradition, fleece is often transcribed with an onglide, either phonetically as [ɪ̯i], or phonemically as /ij/, though many accents may have more aggressive onglides up to and including [ə̯i].
For weak syllables, the onglide is not an option. Words such as react, create, beyond, sierra, with a weak fleece vowel before another vowel, have a vowel that is slightly reduced, but mostly in the same range as fleece. Other instances, where some accents might have a contrast to schwa as a weak/unstressed kit vowel (see the kit Lexical Set), others might have a weak fleece vowel. So the first syllable of a word like believe might be pronounced with a range of vowels: [bəˈliv, bɪˈliv, biˈliv].
At the end of a word, as in pretty, sari, coffee, the unstressed vowel that in some accents is parallel with fleece (while in others is closest to kit, is covered by the Lexical Set happy. This can also include prefixes[1] ending in ‹i›, as in multi-, semi-, anti-, or compounds where the first element ends in ‹y›, such as everything, anyone, and other similar contexts.
The fleece Lexical Set does not contain the words with this vowel followed by /r/; these words are covered in near.
- 🕊Free: does not require a following consonant, and can exist on its own
- in stressed syllables; in unstressed syllables the vowel can be reduced somewhat—see happy for more details.
Spellings
Wells, in devising the fleece Lexical Set, created three subgroups that correspond to historical pronunciations. When accents split fleece, they tend to do so along these historical lines.
fleece Ⓐ: historical /eː/, spelled ‹e, ee, eCe›, as in see, meet, glebe;
fleece Ⓑ: historical /ɛː/, spelled ‹ea, oeC, aeC›, as in seat, amoeba, aegis;
fleece Ⓒ: historical loan words, spelled ‹iCe, iCV, i›, as in police, visa, ski.
For our purposes, perhaps fleece Ⓑ is most interesting as it occasionally is pronounced differently from how fleece Ⓐ and Ⓒ are pronounced. The historical pronunciations changed during the Great Vowel Shift at the end of the 15th century, where fleece Ⓐ /eː/ became /iː/, and fleece Ⓑ /ɛː/ became /eː/. At the end of the 16th century, when the fleece Merger of Ⓐ and Ⓑ occurred, some accents stayed behind; these accents don’t have meet/meat as homophones. However, it is worth saying that accents that preserve the split are becoming extremely rare, and the pronunciation may be extinct or considered a stereotype.
Pronunciations
The fleece lexi