# "Cloth" lexical set: Is there a complete description of the possible conditioning environments? Tags: english, phonology, historical-linguistics, american-english - Score: 6 - Views: 1918 - Answers: 2 - Answered: yes - Asked by: brass tacks (19570 rep) - Asked: 2016-02-11 - Edited: 2017-04-13 - Site: linguistics ## Question This question is about speakers without the cot-caught merger (so, speakers who pronounce words such as “lot,” “cot,” “swat" with a distinct vowel from words such as “thought,” “caught,” “water.”) I’ll use broad phonemic transcriptions of the British vowel in “lot” as /ɒ/, the American vowel in “lot” as /ɑ/, and the vowel in “thought” for any speaker as /ɔ/. Usually, the British phoneme /ɒ/ corresponds to the American phoneme /ɑ/; this is the definition of the “LOT” lexical set. There are known patterns of exceptions where the American phoneme may be /ɔ/ instead, such as before /r/ (where Americans have /ɑ/ or /ɔ/ depending on the word, with some variation also by dialect) and before the phonemes /f/, /θ/, /s/, /ŋ/, /ɡ/, and a few unpatterned exceptions for some speakers such as “chocolate,” “on” and “gone.” Generally, these words are called the “CLOTH” l