harmonically bound

harmonically bound (third-person singular simple present harmonically bounds, present participle harmonically bounding, simple past and past participle harmonically bounded)

1. (transitive, linguistics, Optimality Theory) Of an input-output pair, to incur a proper subset of constraint violations of a different input-output pair.

In the example below, β is harmonically bounded by α:

Input γ	Constraint 1	Constraint 2
α
β	*	*

This output candidate harmonically bounds all other possible output candidates.

• harmonic bounding