Functional load

Notion in linguistics In linguistics and especially phonology, functional load, or phonemic load, is the collection of words that contain a certain pronunciation feature (a phoneme) 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; references to it can be found in the work of Vilém Mathesius in 1929. Its most vocal advocate was André Martinet, 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. Now, with a large text corpus, one can compute the fun