Quantifying the functional load of phonemic oppositions, distinctive features, and suprasegmentals
Dinoj Surendran, Partha Niyogi · Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series 4, Current issues in linguistic theory · 2006
Languages convey information using several methods, and rely to different extents on different methods. The amount of reliance of a language on a method is termed the ’functional load’ of the method in the language. The term goes back to early Prague School days (Mathesius, 1929; Jakobson, 1931; Trubetzkoy, 1939), though then it was usually taken to refer only to the importance of phonemic contrasts, particularly binary oppositions.