TR-2003-12
Measuring the Functional Load of Phonological Contrasts
Dinoj Surendran; Partha Niyogi. 4 November, 2003.
Communicated by Partha Niyogi.
Abstract
Frequency counts are a measure of how much use a language makes of a linguistic unit,
such as a phoneme or a word. However, what is often important is not the units themselves,
but the contrasts between them. A measure is therefore needed for how much use a language
makes of a contrast, i.e., the functional load (FL) of the contrast. We generalize previous work in linguistics and speech recognition and propose a family of measures
for the FL of several phonological contrasts, including phonemic oppositions, distinctive
features, suprasegmentals, and phonological rules. We then test it for robustness to
changes of corpora. Finally, we provide examples in Cantonese, Dutch, English, German,
and Mandarin, in the context of historical linguistics, language acquisition and
speech recognition. More information can be found at http://dinoj.info/research/fload.
Original Document
The original document is available in Postscript (uploaded 4 November, 2003 by
Partha Niyogi).
