position (n.)

(1) A term used in linguistics to refer to the functionally contrastive places within a linguistic unit, e.g. phonemes within the syllable or word, morphemes within the word, words within the sentence. It is common to talk of elements occurring in initial, medial or final ‘positions’ within the higher-order unit. A positional variant refers to the formal variations introduced into a linguistic unit (usually a phoneme or morpheme) because of the conditioning influence of its linguistic context.

(2) In phonetics, position refers to the arrangement of the vocal organs during the articulation of a sound: the various articulators (lips, tongue, etc.) are said to be in certain positions, according to their place and manner of articulation.