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The term \emph{functional load} has a long history and first came into use at the turn of the 20th century, often being mentioned in the Prague School. A formal definition, however, was not developed until quite a few years later. The idea behind functional load in a broad sense is that it is the amount of work a given unit (usually a phoneme) does in a language to distinguish words from one another.   André Martinet posited that functional load was a key factor in language change \citep{Martinet_1955}; \citep{Martinet1955};  specifically he claimed that phonemes with lower functional load tend to merge, whereas phonemes with higher functional load tend to stay distinct. This hypothesis has been explored to some extent over the years \citep[cf.][]{King_1967,Wedel_Jackson_Kaplan_2013,Wedel_Kaplan_Jackson_2013}. \citep[cf.][]{King1967,Wedel2013a,Wedel2013}.  The most basic way that has been proposed to measure functional load is by counting the number of minimal pairs that are distinguished by a phonemic contrast. Indeed this method is still in use today \citep[e.g.,][]{Wedel_Kaplan_Jackson_2013}. \citep[e.g.,][]{Wede2013}.  It is with this method that we decided to begin our research, in order to get a general idea of the distribution of the lexicon, before venturing into more complex calculations. A complication does arise however in that functional load is traditionally spoken of in reference to \emph{phonemes} rather than features. We therefore needed to redefine the term \emph{minimal pair} in order to perform our calculations. We define a phonemic minimal pair as a pair of words in a given language which are contrasted by only one phonological segment. Furthermore, we define a featural minimal pair as \emph{a phonemic minimal pair where the difference between the segments affects only one feature}. The pair of words \phon{pɛ̃}, \emph{pain} and \phon{dɛ̃}, \emph{daim} form a phonemic minimal pair in that they are distinguished solely by their initial segment, but they do not form a \emph{featural} minimal pair because these segments are contrasted in two features (i.e., \emph{voicing} and \emph{place}). The pair /pul/, \emph{poule} (chicken) and /bul/, \emph{boule} (ball), however, do form a featural minimal pair as the segments that distinguish them differ only in \emph{voicing}.   It is of course important to establish what is to be considered a word in order to perform such a calculation. For the purposes of this study, we considered all \emph{lemmata} to be \enquote{words}. This choice was made on the assumption that alternate forms of words, including feminine and plural forms, are not stored separately in the mental lexicon and that phonological features would therefore not be used to contrast them in the same way as for the base forms. All calculations were performed using the \abv{Lexique} database of the French lexicon \citep{New_Pallier_Ferrand_Matos_2001}. \citep{New2001}.  It contains \mbox{47,341} lemmata, of which \mbox{28,885} are nouns. Phonological transcriptions are provided in this database based on canonical pronunciation. We thus began our research by counting the number of minimal pairs that we observed in each phonological feature.   Overall counts were performed (one for each feature), such that each time a minimal pair was found in feature $x$, the $x$ count was updated. A pair like \phon{pɛ̃}\textasciitilde\phon{bɛ̃} would be considered to be a \emph{voicing} pair, and the \emph{voicing} count would therefore be increased by one. This process was performed for each \emph{unique} pair of words. This basically means that \phon{pɛ̃}\textasciitilde\phon{bɛ̃} was considered to be equivalent to \phon{bɛ̃}\textasciitilde\phon{pɛ̃}. Again, only \emph{featural} minimal pairs as previously defined were counted.