Phonological rule

A formal statement describing how speech sounds are patterned or change in a language. Rules commonly express how a sound is realized in a particular phonetic or phonological context.

Assimilation: A sound change in which one segment becomes more like a neighboring segment. Many rules formalize assimilation by specifying which feature spreads and in what environment.
Phoneme: A contrastive sound category in a language that can distinguish words. Rules are often stated as operations on phonemes or their realizations.
Vowel harmony: A phonological pattern in which vowels within a domain agree in one or more features. It is a clear case of a rule relating nonadjacent vowels across a word.
Optimality Theory: A linguistic framework that models grammar through ranked, violable constraints. It accounts for many sound patterns without deriving them through ordered rewrite rules.
Dissimilation: A sound change in which similar sounds become less alike. It illustrates rules that prevent repetition of similar features across a word.
Allophone: A context-dependent pronunciation variant of a phoneme that does not distinguish meaning. Rules often explain how one phoneme has different allophones in different contexts.
Final-obstruent devoicing: A pattern in which obstruents become voiceless at the ends of words or syllables. It demonstrates a rule conditioned by a segment’s position.
Phonological constraint: A condition on possible sound structures in a language. Constraint-based analyses describe patterns as conditions on outputs rather than rule applications.
Phonological environment: The surrounding sounds or prosodic conditions that affect a phonological process. A rule’s environment states where its sound change applies.
Distinctive feature: A phonological property, such as voicing or place of articulation, used to characterize sound contrasts and patterns. Feature notation lets rules target shared properties rather than individual sounds.

Linked from 9 pages