Phonological word in the context of "Clitic"

In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological process in which vowels assimilate ("harmonize") to share certain distinctive features. Vowel harmony is often confined to the domain of a phonological word, but may extend across word boundaries in certain languages.

Generally, one vowel will trigger a shift in other vowels within the domain, such that the affected vowels match the relevant feature of the trigger vowel. Intervening segments are common between affected vowels, meaning that the vowels do not need to be next to each other for this change to apply, classifying this as a "long-distance" type of assimilation. Common phonological features that define the natural classes of vowels involved in vowel harmony include vowel backness, vowel height, nasalization, roundedness, and advanced and retracted tongue root.

In linguistics, a prosodic unit is a segment of speech that occurs with specific prosodic properties. These properties can be those of stress, intonation (a single pitch and rhythm contour), or tonal patterns.

Prosodic units occur at a hierarchy of levels, from the syllable, the metrical foot and phonological word to the intonational unit (IU) and to a complete utterance. However, the term is often restricted to intermediate levels which do not have a dedicated terminology. Prosodic units do not generally correspond to syntactic units, such as phrases and clauses; it is thought that they reflect different aspects of how the brain processes speech, with prosodic units being generated through on-line interaction and processing, and with morphosyntactic units being more automated.

Crasis (/ˈkreɪsɪs/; from the Greek κρᾶσις, lit. 'mixing' or 'blending') is a type of contraction in which two vowels or diphthongs merge into one new vowel or diphthong, making one word out of two (univerbation). Crasis occurs in many languages, including French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish; it was first described in Ancient Greek.

In some cases, as in the French examples, crasis involves the grammaticalization of two individual lexical items into one. However, in other cases, like in the Greek examples, crasis is the orthographic representation of the encliticization and the vowel reduction of one grammatical form with another. The difference between them is that the Greek examples involve two grammatical words and a single phonological word, but the French examples involve a single phonological word and grammatical word.