A phonological rule is a formal way of expressing a systematic phonological or morphophonological process in linguistics. Phonological rules are commonly used in generative phonology as a notation to capture sound-related operations and computations the human brain performs when producing or comprehending spoken language. They may use phonetic notation or distinctive features or both.
John Goldsmith (1995) defines phonological rules as mappings between two different levels of sounds representation[1]—in this case, the abstract or underlying level and the surface level—and Bruce Hayes (2009) describes them as "generalizations" about the different ways a sound can be pronounced in different environments.[2] That is to say, phonological rules describe how a speaker goes from the abstract representation stored in their brain, to the actual sound they articulate when they speak. In general, phonological rules start with the underlying representation of a sound (the phoneme that is stored in the speaker's mind) and yield the final surface form, or what the speaker actually pronounces.[3] When an underlying form has multiple surface forms, this is often referred to as allophony. For example, the English plural written -s may be pronounced as [s] (in "cats"), [z] (in "cabs", "peas"), or as [əz] (in "buses"); these forms are all theorized to be stored mentally as the same -s, but the surface pronunciations are derived through a series of phonological rules.[4]
Phonological rule may also refer to a diachronic sound change in historical linguistics.