vowelsequence

Vowelsequence is a term used in linguistics to denote the ordered sequence of vowel phonemes that occur in a word or morpheme, when consonants are ignored. The concept focuses on the vowels as they appear in surface form and can be used to study patterns of vowel harmony, vowel quality, and syllable structure. The term is not universally standardized, but is employed in phonological descriptions and computational models as a concise label for vowel sequences across phonological strings.

Formal description: If a word has vowels v1, v2, ..., vn in the order they occur, the vowelsequence is the sequence (v1, v2, ..., vn). Vowels are typically described by features such as height, backness, rounding, and tenseness; constraints on vowelsequences may reflect harmony rules or phonotactic constraints. In some analyses, sequences across syllable boundaries are considered; in others, only within a syllable. Diphthongs may be treated as single vowels or as multiple vowel elements depending on the theory.

Examples and uses: education yields the vowelsequence [e, u, a, i, o]; sequoia yields [e, u, o, i, a]; beautiful yields [e, a, u, i, u]. Vowelsequences are used in descriptive analyses of languages with vowel harmony, in computational phonology for modeling vowel patterns, and in applications such as text-to-speech and speech recognition. Researchers also employ vowelsequences in cross-linguistic typology to compare vowel inventories and structural constraints.