Bridging phonological system and lexicon: Insights from a corpus study of functional load

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a functional and cross-language perspective on the organization of phonological systems based on the notion of functional load (FL). Using large corpora, we quantitatively characterize the relationships between phonological components (segments, stress and tones) by estimating their role at the lexical level. In a first analysis, we examine the relative contribution of each phonological subsystem to the pool of lexical distinctions and compare the results between two tonal (Cantonese and Mandarin) and seven non-tonal languages (English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Swahili). The equal weight of vowels and tones in lexical distinction is confirmed as well as the phenomenon of consonantal bias – advocated in several psycholinguistic studies – in five languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Swahili), with various corpus configurations in order to assess the influence of morphology and usage frequency. Our results reflect a strong preference toward consonant-based distinctions rather than vowel-based distinctions in a reduced (lemmatized) configuration of the lexicon. This preference is nevertheless modulated when inflectional morphology and usage frequency were considered. A second analysis consists in a cross-language comparison of the internal FL distribution within vocalic and consonantal subsystems in nine languages. We observe uneven FL distributions with only a few salient high-FL contrasts.Shared trends in terms of the mostly employed phonological features are also revealed but a few language-specific patterns are also present. These results are discussed in terms of organization and processing of the mental lexicon.