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