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When reading David Share's research article, Blueprint for a Universal Theory of Learning to Read: The Combinatorial Model, I came across the following sentence:
"A non-linguistic semasiography that directly encodes conceptual meaning is a non-sequitur and exists only in very restricted communicative contexts, incapable of achieving the full expressive power of human language."
Whew! There's a lot packed into that one sentence. If you wish to read the paper that inspired Dr. Peter Bowers own look at morphology as binding agent, be prepared.
Now what does that all mean? Share's paper, no easy read, seeks to take all of the world's languages into account when designing a theory of reading acquisition, no easy feat. He claims that current thinking is too Anglo-centric, and I'm inclined to agree.
There are many "big words" in that one statement, but the one that was unfamiliar to me was semasiography. This word contains some parts that are familiar to me, but I'm unsure if the base is one that I know. Since it is the subject of our sentence, and I wish to understand Share's paper, it's imperative I look more deeply at this word.
On this investigation we will find out what to do when our word isn't in the dictionary. We will learn about a suffixal construction and a default connecting vowel letter. We will look closely at some etymological relatives before looking at schwa.
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Meaning
What is this word's meaning and how does the word function?
Often, my first look at the actual meaning of a word will take into account the context the word is in. This sentence occurs in a section under the heading Linguistics and comes during a discussion of writing systems. We explore the English writing system with our students while doing these word investigations. We are hoping that by exploring one word, we can learn more about its family, and thus, more about the English orthographic system as a whole.
The sentence prior states, "Chinese is a morphosyllabary, not an ideography or even logography: only a tiny fraction of characters are truly iconic—directly encoding meaning (Taylor & Taylor, 2014)." He also says a semasiography can be "non-linguistic." Based on context, I'm thinking a semasiography is a synonym for a writing system perhaps.
Unfortunately, my go-to, the Collins dictionary, cannot help us. No entry.
My backup, the Longman? Also no entry.
When I do a Google search, the AI tells me a semasiography is "a system of writing or communication that uses symbols to convey meaning directly without relying on the sounds of a spoken language. Examples include mathematical notation, musical scores, computer icons, emoji....and hieroglyphs."
Interestingly, our word has an antonym, glottographic writing, which represents the sounds and words of a specific spoken language. A semasiography bypasses spoken language entirely.
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Structure
What are the elements that make up this word's structure?
There is a familiar suffixal construction with this word, <-ography>. We see this construction on words like geography and biography. A suffixal construction is made up of a series of suffixes or connecting vowel letters and suffixes. It appears often enough over the writing system that we designate it a "construction." It is morphologically complex, consisting of several elements.
semasi + o + graph + y
The graphein, "write." The construction has developed to mean all we have "written" or "recorded" on a topic.
The connecting vowel letter we find in Greek compounds.
The default in Latin is . Defaults occur unless there is a reason not to. For example, in the word variety we already have a base that ends in . We can't have *variity! So we use a connecting vowel letter
But what about the base in this word? What to make of
Unfortunately, we do not have an entry in Etymonline, so we look to Wikipedia. Here we see the word is from Greek semasia, "signification." I'm starting to see some connections here to other words I know associated with meaning.
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Relatives
What are the word's relatives and history?
The first question in the Four Question Framework, "What does this word mean and how does it function?" deals with semantics, or the "meanings" of words. The word semantics is related to our word semasiography. In fact, Wiktionary tells me that semantics replaced semasiology.
Other relatives include semiotics and polysemy, words with multiple meanings. You might be familiar with semaphore code; the seme in linguistics which is "a sign or symbol." All of these words are etymological relatives, as they share a root, but not a base with our word semasiography.
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Graphemes
What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?
This word is pronounced /sɪmeɪsiˈɑɡɹəfi/, with each vowel in the base getting a full pronunciation (sih-MAY-see-AH-gruh-fee). In contrast, the vowel in our suffixal construction is schwaed. A schwaed vowel is a reduced vowel. In IPA, this is shown as /ə/. Many words ending in this construction will have the same reduced vowel.
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Next Steps
What concepts from this investigation can we explore next to learn more about the English orthographic system?
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What suffixal constructions have you found as patterns in words? HINT: There's another in the first paragraph of the Relatives section. (And the last paragraph in Structure)(Big Idea #4) |
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Perhaps you could research those Latin words that have connecting vowel letters that are not . What do you find? If connecting vowel letters do not have meaning, then why do people call morphemes the "smallest unit of meaning?" (HINT: I don't.)(Big Idea #4) |
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Once students have the hang of morphological relatives, many of them find the concept of etymological relatives much more fascinating. This is where we see word connections reaching across languages, opening us up to more patterns in the system. How are capture, reception, and receive related? (Big Idea #7) |
When I finish investigating a word with a student, I will go back and plug it back in to the reading we were doing. Decontextualized learning isn't helpful. Let's return to Share's sentence:
"A non-linguistic semasiography that directly encodes conceptual meaning is a non-sequitur and exists only in very restricted communicative contexts, incapable of achieving the full expressive power of human language."
What Share is saying here is that languages do not directly encode meaning. Often we think of Chinese as being pictures of various concepts. The reality is that the Chinese orthographic system is based on more than just concepts, or meaning. The same is true of the English orthographic system as well. We know through scientific word study that it is made up of meaning, morphology, and etymology as well as phonology. Investigating words through the Four Questions helps us to see all aspects of orthography.
What was your biggest aha in this investigation? Hit reply and tell me. Then pass this aha on to a colleague of yours and see if they find an aha too.
Stay curious,
Brad
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P.S. Morphemes, like other linguistic terms ending in <-eme> (phoneme, grapheme), are mental concepts. Written morphemes can be referred to as elements, as I do in these newsletters. The term morph exists in linguistics but is rarely used. Morphemes are the smallest structural unit of words. These structural units include bases, prefixes, suffixes, and connecting vowel letters.
P.P.S. You may have noticed the Next Steps are now linked to the related Big Ideas of English Orthography. The Big Ideas are those concepts that show again and again in our work with students. To find out more about these Big Ideas, sign up for the course I teach with Dr. Jennifer Petrich, Connecting the D.O.T.S.: Integrating Scientific Word Study into Your Practice at this link.
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