Phonological Rule - Format and Notation

Format and Notation

The rule given above for intervocalic alveolar flapping describes what sound is changed, what the sound changes to, and where the change happens (in other words, what the environment is that triggers the change). The illustration below presents the same rule, with each of its parts labelled and described.

  1. Title of the rule
  2. The underlying sound that is changed. In this example, the brackets represent all the features the changed sounds have in common; /t/ and /d/ are both stop consonants and both articulated with the tongue touching the alveolar ridge. Therefore, this rule applies to all sounds that share those features (in English, only /t/ and /d/). Rules can be written with just the individual sound to be changed, but using square bracket notation allows the rule to apply to a class of related sounds.
  3. The arrow represents that the sound on the left changes to have the features on the right.
  4. The sound that /t/ and /d/ (in this example) change to, or the individual features that change.
  5. The slash is a shorthand notation for "in the environment where...". It means that the notation to the right describes where the phonological rule is applied.
  6. The sound, or the features of the sound, that precedes the one to be changed. In this example, the /t/ or /d/ that becomes flapped must be preceded by a stressed vowel.
  7. The location of the sound that is going to be changed. In this example, the underline means that the /t/ or /d/ that becomes flapped must be in between two vowels (where the first is stressed and the second is not).
  8. The sound, or the features of the sound, that follows the one to be changed. In this example, the /t/ or /d/ that becomes flapped must be followed by an unstressed vowel.
  9. A prose description of the rule, specifying when it applies and what it changes.

Taken together and read from left to right, this notation of the rule for intervocalic alveolar flapping states that any alveolar stop consonant (/t/ or /d/) becomes a tap in the environment where it is preceded by a stressed vowel and followed by an unstressed one.

Phonological rules are often written using distinctive features, which are (supposedly) natural characteristics that describe the acoustic and articulatory makeup of a sound; by selecting a particular bundle, or "matrix," of features, it is possible to represent a group of sounds that form a natural class and pattern together in phonological rules. For example, in the rule above, rather than writing /t/ and /d/ separately, phonologists may write the features that they have in common, thus capturing the whole set of sounds that are stop consonants and are pronounced by placing the tongue against the alveolar ridge. In the most commonly used feature system, the features to represent these sounds would be, which describe the manner of articulation and the position and shape of the tongue when pronouncing these two sounds. But rules are not always written using features; in some cases, especially when the rule applies only to a single sound, rules are written using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Read more about this topic:  Phonological Rule