12 The THOUGHT Lexical Set
The thought lexical set features words with the stressed vowel “aw,” or /ɔ/. The thought vowel is Free, so it can occur with no following consonant, and is always stressed in its dictionary form. The thought Lexical Set does not contain the words with this vowel followed by /r/; these words are in north and force.
thought is sometimes merged with the lot and/or palm Lexical Sets, as it is in some North American accents.
- 🕊Free: does not require a following consonant, and can exist on its own
- in stressed syllables and unstressed ones, too.
Spellings
Ⓐ auC, ough, aw, al, alk;
Ⓑ alC (other than /k/) – may merge with lot, depending on generation or region (sometimes known as the salt lexical set.)
The vast majority of words within the thought set are spelled with multiple letters, “au” before a consonant (C) as in “sauce,” or “augh, ough, aw, al, alk” as in taught, bought, jaw, wall, talk. Less common spellings include: Arkansas, dawn, awe, Sean, broad.
Pronunciations
The thought lexical set is pronounced with an open-mid back vowel, usually with at least some range of roundness. Frequently it’s [ɔ], with variations in the range of [ɒ~ɔ~o] in many of the mainstream accents of English. thought can merge with:
- lot, which is likely to be a bit more open/somewhat less rounded, and/or
- palm, which is unrounded, more open, and possibly more front, and/or
- cloth, which has no effect on pronunciation, but merely adds more words that can be spoken with the thought vowel.
Some accents have diphthongs for their pronunciations of thought, either one that becomes more rounded/close over time (e.g. [ɒo̯] which you might hear in the Southern US), or one that moves toward schwa, a centring diphthong, [ɔə̯], as you hear in some Cockney (in “free” syllables, with no following consonant), or New York City accents, where thought may merge with force.
For Englishes with a centralized goat vowel such as [əʊ̯ ~ əʉ̯ ~ ɛ̠ʉ̯], thought can move up into the range of [o], through a process known as a chain shift, where thought is moving “up” to fill in a gap left by goat’s forward movement. For example, in contemporary Standard British English, thought is now higher (more close) than it was in traditional Received Pronunciation, which was higher than old-fashioned RP (Lindsay, 2019).
Many second-language (L2) speakers of English either lack an equivalent [ɔ] vowel in their first-language (L1) vowel system, or they use it for /o/; in almost all of these cases, the tendency is for thought to merge with goat [o~ɔ]. L2 speakers may use spelling pronunciations for words with spellings other than ‹o›, especially in languages where spelling and pronunciation are more directly linked than in English.
Personal Pronunciation
Your personal pronunciation of thought is worthy of some exploration. But first, let’s see whether you have a merger with any of the possible candidates: cloth, lot, or palm. Note that many palm words may be distributed to other lexic