La typologie des systèmes vocaliques revisitée sous l’angle de la charge fonctionnelle

Abstract

Most studies in phonological typology implicitly assume that all segments in an inventory are equally important. We suggest here that the notion of functional load enriches this usual representation of phonological systems. Focusing on the vowel systems of 12 languages, we developed a corpus-based approach that reveals a very uneven use of the vowel contrasts available from their inventory. Furthermore, the crosslinguistic comparison reveals no uniform tendency to favor maximal contrasts (such as /a/~/i/ and /a/~/u/). It actually highlights that several languages with similar inventories may exhibit different contrast patterns, questioning some well-established universal tendencies.