In
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
and especially
phonology
Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...
, functional load, or phonemic load, is the collection of words that contain a certain pronunciation feature (a
phoneme
A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
) that makes distinctions between other words. Phonemes with a high functional load distinguish a large number of words from other words, and phonemes with a low functional load distinguish relatively fewer words from other words. The omission or mishearing of features with a high functional load thus leads to more confusion than features with a low functional load.
Overview
The term "functional load" goes back to the days of the
Prague School
The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle is a language and literature society. It started in 1926 as a group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and ...
; references to it can be found in the work of
Vilém Mathesius
Vilém Mathesius (, 3 August 1882 – 12 April 1945) was a Czech linguist, literary historian and co-founder of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He is considered one of the founders of structural functionalism in linguistics.
Mathesius was the edito ...
in 1929. Its most vocal advocate was
André Martinet
André Martinet (; 12 April 1908 – 16 July 1999) was a French linguist, influential due to his work on structural linguistics. In linguistic theory, Martinet is known especially for his studies on linguistic economy and double articulation.
...
, a historical linguist who claimed it was a factor in the likelihood of a phonological merger.
The first suggested measurement for functional load was the number of minimal pairs, but that does not take into account word frequency and is difficult to generalize beyond binary phonemic oppositions. Charles Hockett proposed an
information theoretic definition in 1955, which has since been generalized.
[Surendran and Niyogi]
Quantifying the functional load of phonemic oppositions, distinctive features, and suprasegmentals
chapter in ''Current trends in the theory of linguistic change. In commemoration of Eugenio Coseriu (1921-2002)'', Ole Nedergaard Thomsen (editor), Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. Now, with a large
text corpus
In linguistics and natural language processing, a corpus (: corpora) or text corpus is a dataset, consisting of natively digital and older, digitalized, language resources, either annotated or unannotated.
Annotated, they have been used in corp ...
, one can compute the functional load of any phonological contrast including
distinctive feature
In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonology, phonological structure that distinguishes one Phone (phonetics), sound from another within a language. For example, the feature Voice (phonetics), voice
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound productio ...
''distinguishes ...
s,
suprasegmental
In linguistics, prosody () is the study of elements of speech, including intonation, stress, rhythm and loudness, that occur simultaneously with individual phonetic segments: vowels and consonants. Often, prosody specifically refers to such ele ...
s, and distinctions between groups of
phoneme
A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
s. For instance, the functional load of tones in
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretch ...
is as high as that of vowels: the information lost when all tones sound alike is as much as that lost when all vowels sound alike.
[Surendran and Levow]
''The functional load of tone in Mandarin is as high as that of vowels''
Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2004, Nara, Japan, pp. 99–102.
Martinet predicted that perceptually similar pairs of phonemes with low functional load would merge. This has not been proved empirically; indeed, all empirical tests have come out against it; for example, merged with in
Cantonese
Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...
in word-initial position in the late 20th century although of all the consonants in binary opposition to , only the opposition had a higher functional load than the opposition.
Examples
English
English
vowel
A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
s, for example, have a very high functional load. There are innumerable sets of words
distinguished just by their vowels, such as ''pin, pen, pan, pun, pain, pine''.
Voicing is similar, as can be seen in ''pat - bad, few - view''. Speakers who do not control these differences make it very difficult for others to understand them.
However, although voicing is generally important in English, the voicing difference between the two fricatives written ⟨th⟩, , has a very low functional load: it is difficult to find meaningful distinctions dependent solely on this difference. One of the few examples is ''thigh'' vs. ''thy'' although the two can be distinguished from context alone. Similar is the difference of (written ⟨j⟩, ⟨ge⟩, etc.) versus (
resulting from , or the ⟨j⟩, ⟨ge⟩, etc. in some recent
French loanwords), as in ''virgin'' vs. ''version''. The difference between the two ⟨ng⟩ sounds, , found in ''singer'' and ''finger'', is so unimportant that it makes no practical difference if one confuses them, and some dialects pronounce the sounds the same in both words. The functional load is nearly zero, which is unsurprising since the phoneme originated as a
coalescence of when it was word-final.
An ongoing example would be the merger of the AIR and EAR vowels in
New Zealand English
New Zealand English (NZE) is the variant of the English language spoken and written by most English-speaking New Zealanders. Its language code in ISO and Internet standards is en-NZ. It is the first language of the majority of the populati ...
. The phonetic similarity between words like ''here'' and ''hare'' does not seem to hamper oral communication greatly if context is provided. Therefore, those vowels have low functional load in New Zealand English despite their high frequency of occurrences in that dialect. The distinction is fully maintained in nearby
Australian English
Australian English (AusE, AusEng, AuE, AuEng, en-AU) is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to Australia. It is the country's common language and ''de facto'' national language. While Australia has no of ...
, where many find comedy and confusion in mergers such as ''sheep-sharing'' vs. ''sheep-shearing''.
Mandarin
The functional load of
tone
Tone may refer to:
Visual arts and color-related
* Tone (color theory), a mix of tint and shade, in painting and color theory
* Tone (color), the lightness or brightness (as well as darkness) of a color
* Toning (coin), color change in coins
* ...
in
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretch ...
is approximately equal to the functional load of
vowels
A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
. The loss of information when all tones sound alike in Mandarin is approximately equal to that when all vowels sound alike.
By contrast, in many
Bantu languages
The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu language, Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀), or Ntu languages are a language family of about 600 languages of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern, East Africa, Eastern and Southeast Africa, South ...
, the tones have a low functional load, and in
Swahili, tones have disappeared altogether.
References
{{reflist
Phonology