14 The FACE Lexical Set
face is parallel to the goat lexical set: they both can either be realized as a Closing Diphthong or as a Monophthong, and frequently they match in that regard. Closing Diphthongs go from wherever the nucleus starts to a close, narrow coda. In this case, the nucleus of the diphthong is frequently mid-close or mid-open [e ~ ɛ], which then off-glides towards [ɪ̯ ~ i̯]. In accents where its nucleus is more open, face is still the most front and closest of the Closing Diphthongs. Sometimes face is a monophthong, either in very short words said at high speed, such as bait, or in unstressed syllables, which some accents might have in words like maintain, which may be pronounced as /menˈteɪ̯n/, with a monophthong for the first, unstressed syllable and a diphthong for the second, stressed syllable. Also, there are many accents where face is a monophthong in all settings, and its quality is typically in the area of [e ~ ɛ]. The other main accent option is for a “wide” closing diphthong, which begins with a nucleus more in the range of [ɛ ~ æ ~ ɐ], but still offgliding to the front narrow non-syllabic vowels of [ɪ̯ ~ i̯]. face can be in both Free and Checked syllables, both stressed and unstressed.
Many face vowels in unstressed syllables are the result of compound words, such as tea-table, flypaper, prefixes like a- as in agraphia, or suffixes like -ate as in agitate, nominate, mutilate. Though in some cases unstressed face can reduce from a diphthong to a monophthong, it frequently does not.
- 🕊Free: does not require a following consonant, and can exist on its own, e.g. bay
- An unrounded, narrow Closing Diphthong, that moves from mid-close front towards close front.
- in stressed and unstressed syllables
Spellings
Wells, in devising the face Lexical Set, created three subgroups that correspond to spellings, which relate to historical spellings. These, in turn, relate to accent varieties that haven’t yet merged the three historical subsets into one.
face Ⓐ: ‹a, aCe›, as in bacon, April, late, fade, mane, which was /aː/ before the Great Vowel Shift (GVS);
face Ⓑ: ‹ai, ay, ei, ey, aig(h), eig(h)›, as in wait, day, rein, they, straight, weight;
face Ⓒ: ‹ea›, as in great, steak, break, yea.
The keyword “stay” has been suggested as an alternate for face Ⓑ and face Ⓒ[1].
Wells identified words associated with a following /r/ (or even a vowel-formerly-known-as-/r/, as we get with non-rhotic accents), that begin with a vowel that is parallel to face and or dress such as care or dairy, which he called the square Lexical Set.
Pronunciations
Across all accents, the nucleus of the face lexical set is pronounced with a broad range of unrounded vowels [e ~ ɛ ~ æ ~ ɐ] with an offglide towards /j/, typically [ɪ̯], and sometimes with more closure—what I call more “bite,” as if you’re biting down on the diphthong—towards [i̯].
The following chart gives you a sense of the rainbow of articulations for the Closing Diphthong.
| Nucleus | Offglide | |
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