FUNCTIONAL LOAD: TRANSCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS OF THE 10,000 MOST FREQUENT WORDS IN SPOKEN ENGLISH

Abstract

Not all aspects of a language have equal importance for speakers or for learners. From the point of view of language description, functional load is a construct that attempts to establish quantifiable hierarchies of relevance among elements of a linguistic class. This paper makes use of analyses conducted on the 10-million-word spoken subcorpus of the British National Corpus in order to characterize what amounts to approximately 97% of the phonological forms and components heard and produced by fluent speakers in a range of contexts. Our aim is to provide segmental, sequential, and syllabic level rankings of spoken English that can serve as the basis for reference and subsequent work by language educators and researchers.