demarcative (adj.)

A term used in PHONETICS and PHONOLOGY to refer to a FEATURE which marks the boundary of a linguistic UNIT. The feature does not have to be coterminous with the boundary: in Welsh, for example, word STRESS falls (with few exceptions) on the penultimate syllable of a POLYSYLLABIC word, and therefore has a potentially demarcative function, in that it can be used to predict the subsequent location of the WORD boundary.