15 The PRICE Lexical Set
A Closing Diphthong goes from wherever the nucleus starts to a close coda. The most common type of price is a wide closing diphthong, where the nucleus of the diphthong is open [a ~ ɑ], which then off-glides towards [ɪ̯], so we have [aɪ̯ ~ a̠ɪ̯ ~ ɑ̟ɪ̯ ~ ɑɪ̯]. There are many other variants for price, with as many as five alternate options, depending on how you count them. These include the well-known monophthong version [a] heard in accents of the US South; mid-centralized versions like [əɪ̯] heard in parts of the South of England, which contrasts with the back and sometimes rounded versions (like [ɒɪ̯]) which one might hear there in more urban speech; and finally a diphthong with a mid-front offglide, [ae̯ ~ aɛ̯], as one might hear in Manchester or Leeds. And then there are accents with allophonic variations, that have one version of price before a voiceless consonant, a different version before a voiced consonant (sometimes called pride or prize), and, rarely, a third version at the end of a morpheme or word (sometimes called pried or pry).
price can be in both Free and Checked syllables, both stressed and unstressed. Many price vowels in unstressed syllables are the result of compound words, such as website, guideline, highlight, or suffixes like -side as in outside, seaside or poolside.
- 🕊Free: does not require a following consonant, and can exist on its own, e.g. I, eye
- Frequently a front closing diphthong, though it can be a monophthong
- in stressed and unstressed syllables
Spellings
Wells, in devising the price Lexical Set, created two subgroups that correspond to spellings; those spellings relate to historical pronunciations, though there are very few accents that differentiate these two versions today (and they’re almost exclusively in Scotland). Basically, Group Ⓑ are words that had price followed by the consonant /x/ back in the days of Middle English, and all of the words that take that have ‹ig› in their spelling.
price Ⓐ: ‹iCe, ie, i, y›, as in nice, pie, find, by
price Ⓑ: ‹igh, ign›, as in right, high, sign
As someone from a country where many people have an allophone for price before a voiceless consonant, and a different vowel quality at the end of a word or when followed by voiced consonant, I certainly understand the argument for differentiating the 3 sub-groups, which some define by using the keywords price, prize, and pry. However, re-using the price keyword to represent only one third of the price lexical set seems very confusing. Using alternate keywords, like tight / tide / tied, is probably a better choice.
Pronunciations
Across all accents, the nucleus of the price lexical set is pronounced with a broad range of vowels, either rounded [ɔ ~ ɒ], or unrounded and more open [a ~ ɑ ], or unrounded and more medial [ʌ ~ ə ~ ɐ]. price generally features 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 [i