Skip to content

Phonological Classification & Sound Change

← Back to Domain-Specific Families

Abstractions that classify speech sounds and their patterned variation — secondary articulation as in labialized velar consonants, shared-vowel groupings called lexical sets, weight-sensitive stress and poetic metre, stress-driven vowel reduction and cross-word contraction like crasis — loosely joined by the unrelated WYSIWYG interface concept.

8 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

  • Crasis — A cross-word phonological contraction coalesces adjacent vocalic material into one realized unit, with language-specific spelling and grammatical consequences.
  • Labialized velar consonant — A labialized velar or labiovelar is a velar consonant that is labialized, with a -like secondary articulation.
  • Lexical set — A lexical set is a group of words that share a particular vowel or consonant sound.
  • Metrical Foot — A metrical foot is a local ordered group of syllabic positions defined by a verse tradition's quantity or relative-stress contrast.
  • Poetic Metre — A repeatable prosodic scheme constraining the length or marked positions of verse lines under a tradition's accepted variations.
  • Syllable Weight — A language-specific phonological assignment of moraic or timing weight to syllables that conditions stress, meter, compensatory processes, and other weight-sensitive rules.
  • Vowel reduction — In phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels as a result of changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word (e.g. for the Muscogee language ), and which are perceived as "weakening".
  • WYSIWYG — In computing, WYSIWYG ( ; what you see is what you get) is software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web page, or slide presentation.