Raising Consciousness

You know how sometimes a certain word will keep popping up over and over?  By the time the same word has appeared three or four times, you start to wonder what it might be trying to tell you.

So, of course this happened to me recently.  Across a few different books I was reading, the words conscious, conscience, unselfconsciousness, and unconscionable were cited of examples of certain linguistic phenomena — different phenomena in each case.  In each case, the word was a poorly chosen example, and with plenty of other examples available, I wondered why it was chosen at all.

The first encounter was in an advanced English syntax seminar I’m taking, for which I’m reading Rodney Huddleston’s Introduction to the Grammar of English. Here are the two passages of interest to me here:

(i) “Words may be formed by the application of more than one morphological process.  In unselfconsciousness, for example, the first step is one of compounding, joining the simple stems self and conscious to form the compound stem selfconscious.  To this is then added the prefix un-, yielding the complex stem unselfconscious; and finally -ness is suffixed, to give the final complex stem unselfconsciousness.” (22)

(ii) “The minimal units of morphology are simple stems and affixes . . . In English, almost all simple stems, like stems in general, are free, that is, they can stand alone as words.  Those that cannot are called bound: they include the amic, dur, prob, conscion, vulner of amicable, durable (or duration, etc.), probable, unconscionable, vulnerable . . . ; the beknown and (for most speakers) kempt of unbeknown and unkempt; scissor and trouser of scissors and trousers.” (31)

In order to unpack all of this a little, let’s narrow our focus: we’ll only be worried about Huddleston’s treatment of conscious and conscion as “simple stems” in English.  In order to do so, we’ll need to figure out what Huddleston’s definition of a “simple stem” is.  He is clear that a “simple stem” may be free or bound, as illustrated in (ii) above.  We can also assume that by “minimal”, he means not further divisible.  This is certainly what he means by “simple stems in the sense that they are not analysable into smaller morphological units” (22).

Huddleston explains that simple stems may compound by two joining together, as in blackbird or goldsmith, or, “in affixation, an affix is added to a stem to yield a complex stem” (22).  He then goes on to differentiate between prefixes and suffixes.  Some words, of course, involve more than one morphological process, as he outlines in unselfconsciousness.

Now, let’s get back to those assertions: okay, so if conscious and conscion are “simple stems”, according to Huddleston, that would mean that they are “not analysable into smaller morphological units,” in his own words.  Hmm . . . but if we’re peeling off the -able and -ness suffixes, then why aren’t we also peeling off the -ous and the -on suffixes?  And if affixation includes both prefixes and suffixes, then shouldn’t we also peel off the easily recognizable prefix con-?  If we approach this problem orthographically, we can use word sums to figure out the real structure of these words and their respective “simple stems,” for which I prefer the term base element:

<un> + <self> + <con> + <sci> + <ous> + <ness>

<un> + <con> + <sci> + <on> + <able>

Once we get down to a real simple stem, <sci>, it appears that these two words, in fact, share that stem.  But is it the same stem in both words?  Does it mean the same thing, and come from the same place? Let’s consider the meaning and history of each of these words to look for clues to the meaning of <sci>.

When I consult my standard sources (my Mactionary, the OED, and the online etymology dictionary), I learn the following:

The words conscious, conscience, conscientious, and the now archaic conscionable (“fossilized in its negative,” says etymonline.com) are all related, as are some less familiar words, like conscient, consciental, conscioned, and consciencely. Of all these words, conscience has the earliest attestation, in The Ancren Riwle, a 1225 “treatise on the rules and duties of a monastic life” (Morton 1853).  While I’m not suggesting that these words all developed from one another, I am suggesting that they are morphological siblings, and it’s interesting to look at how they play out chronologically:

1225: conscience

1541: conscionable

1565: unconscionable

1611: conscientious

1651: conscious

1688: self-conscious

1838: unselfconsciousness

When I look up the earliest of these, conscience, I confirm that conscience is related to science, and thus this family of words is related to scientific, scientist, unscientific, and a host of other derivatives, all from the Latin verb scire, ‘to know.’  Interestingly, science is attested in 1300, a little later than conscience, representative, perhaps, of ways in which intellectual pursuits often shadow moral instruction in the Middle Ages.  At any rate, in uncovering the etymological root, we can now get a sense of the meaning that ties these words together in the Modern English base element, <sci>:

conscience: ‘inward knowledge’, vying with and finally replacing the Old English inwit.

conscionable: ‘having a conscience, being reasonable or aware’, derived from a misanalysis of conscience as a plural *conscions.

conscientious : ‘according to inward knowledge or awareness’

conscious: ‘knowing, aware’

science: ‘knowledge acquired by study’ or ‘a particular branch of knowledge’

But wait! That’s not all!  I can add the prefixes <un> and <sub> and several suffixes to some of these words too, and come up with new layers of meaning.  What if we consider prefixes other than <con>?  I decide to visit Neil Ramsden’s Word Searcher and www.morewords.com to look for other words with <sci>, and I come up with prescient, nescient, omniscient and their respective -ence forms, all of the <scient> words, the <consci> words mentioned in his post already, and the etymologically delicious adverbial compound scilicet.  I check with Melvyn Ramsden to see if he’s got a matrix, and he sends me one.  A few days later, he sends me a revised copy, along with a great story.  Here’s the corrected matrix:

Matrix for <sci>

Matrix by Melvyn Ramsden

All of this evidence, then, rather shows Huddleston up.  He himself defines “simple” as “not analysable into smaller morphological units,” a characterization that simply cannot and does not apply to *conscion or to conscious, both of which he calls “simple stems.”  Huddleston is not alone in this misapprehension of morphological analysis: Joan Bybee also refers to realize as a “monomorphemic lexical item” (1985:11). While it is indeed a lexeme, it is not monomorphemic; we can analyze <realize> at least into <real> and <ize>, if not even further into <re> + <al> + <ize>.  At any rate, monomorphemic it is not.  It’s uninflected, which may be what Bybee meant, but that’s not what Bybee wrote.

Perhaps I’m in the wrong here and I’m the one who’s misapprehending the meaning of concepts like morpheme, simple, complex, and analyze, and I’d welcome any linguistic challenges to my assertions.  I suppose some would argue that native speakers aren’t “aware” of the base element <sci>, or of the <real> in <realize>, but I would argue (as I have in these writings several times before) that just because a native speaker isn’t aware of something in language doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and a linguist should be the last person to suggest such an idea.

*               *               *

So, now that we have an understanding of the morphology and the etymology of these words, what about their phonology?  As it turns out, another encounter with the word conscience, in a different text, brought up some very interesting questions, and clarified just how the orthographic phonology works in words with the base <sci>.

In her brand new edition of Speech to Print, Louisa Moats uses the word conscience to illustrate two principles of graphophonemic correspondence, but makes such unscientific errors in her analysis that she unconsciously muddies up the very graohophonemic correspondences she lobbies for.  Moats writes that in the word conscience, “the letter c stands for three different speech sounds: /k/, /š/ and /s/” and also that “a vowel team (two vowel letters) . . . is needed to spell the second vowel /ə/.” (2010:25)

There are two assertions in this statement: one is about the multiple roles of the letter <c> in this word, and the other is about how the schwa sound in the last syllable is spelled.  In her analysis, Moats reveals her unwavering determination to be able to “map” every phoneme onto a grapheme, in a way that leaves no letter unaccounted for.  While I admire her desire to account for every letter in a spelling — something every real speller knows how to do — I cringe at the saturation of error in her proposal.  Let’s take it apart.

In the first assertion, Moats claims that the letter <c> “stands for” three different “speech sounds,” /k/, /ʃ/ and /s/.  While the first <c> does indeed spell /k/, and the final <c> does indeed spell /s/, with some help from the final non-syllabic <e> that follows it, her analysis fails thereafter.  However, if we attempt to map out all of the phonemes and graphemes as Moats suggests, that leaves us with some letters unaccounted for:

<   c   o   n   s   c   ie   n   c   e   >

/   k    ɑ  n        ʃ   ə    n   s       /

If, as Moats says, the medial <c> is spelling /ʃ/, then what is the <s> doing?  Why is there an <s> there at all?  Well, we know from the analysis above that the <s> is part of the base <sci>.  Examined morphophonemically, it’s clear that the <sci> base spells /ʃ/ here.  And that shouldn’t be surprising when we consider the pronunciation of related words like prescient, nescient, omniscient, conscious, or unconscionable.  A <c> can and frequently does spell /ʃ/ before an <i>, but that <i> is often a connector vowel, as in special, musician, or gracious.  Here, the <i> is in the base itself, <sci>.  Even though that <i> isn’t spelling a vowel phoneme, we can’t just drop it from the base.  Clearly, the <c> is not spelling /ʃ/ alone.  It would seem kind of important that we account for that <s> and that <i> as well.

Moats makes no attempt in her “mapping” to account for the <s> in the word here, although she does offer <sc> instead as the spelling for /ʃ/ in this same word on page 93 in this same book.  She does attempt to account for the <i> by grouping it with the <e> as part of a “vowel team.”  Of course, <ie> can be a vowel digraph, two vowel letters acting as a single grapheme in spelling a phoneme, as in the words chief, believe, cookie, or pie.  But is the <ie> a single grapheme in conscience? We can see our answer very easily in the morphological analysis of the word:

<con> + <sci> + <ence>

We can see that the <i> and the <e> are in two different morphemes.  Since a single grapheme cannot bridge two morphemes, the <i> and the <e> must be separate graphemes.  When we assume that two letters next to each other are a single grapheme, we fail to understand how the word is structured, and why it is spelled and pronounced the way it is.  We can confirm this hypothesis when we look at the related words science or conscientious, where the <i> and the <e> each spell different vowel phonemes in different syllables.  Because of the variety of pronunciations of the base <sci>, it’s easiest and most accurate to refer to it by its spelling, <sci>, rather than as any of its allomorphic surface representations, /saɪ/, /ʃi/, /ʃ/, /sɪ/ or any others that may surface in dialects other than mine.

Understanding this principle, that graphemes spell phonemes inside of a single morpheme, allows us to understand the following broader examples from English spelling:

*The word <cried> has no <ie> digraph, despite contentions to that effect in many reading and spelling curricula.  It has an underlying <y> that changed to an <i>, followed by <ed>.  The <i> and the <e> are in different morphemes.

*In the word <father>, the <th> is a single grapheme that spells the phoneme /ð/.  In the word <fathead>, the <t> and the <h> are separate graphemes, spelling different phonemes in different morphemes.

*In the word <cook> the <oo> grapheme spells a single phoneme, /ʊ/, but in the word <cooperate>, each <o> belongs to a different morpheme and spells a different phoneme in different syllables.

Now that we’ve seen (1) the real structure of these words, (2) the errors of these language experts, and (3) a little more of how the English writing system works, let’s consider just why it is that this family of words, words about knowing and awareness, is so structurally obscure to language experts. Although <sci> is the base of about 100 English words, it is noticeably absent from Marcia Henry’s Unlocking Literacy (2010) or Patterns for Success (1996), as well as from Marsha Geller’s SLANT System morpheme deck and from the Advanced Language Tool Kit by Paula Rome and Jean Osman, an old standard in dyslexia remediation.  In fact, I’ve never seen it surface in any list of Latin morphemes in English that I’ve encountered, other than in the work of Melvyn Ramsden and Pete Bowers.  I did recently see Nancy Cushen White present the base <sci> at a conference, but she too has studied with Melvyn Ramsden.

Does this mean that everyone is wrong, and only Melvyn and Pete are right?  Well, yes and no.  Huddleston and Moats are demonstrably incorrect in their morphological and graphophonemic analyses of words with the <sci> base, respectively.  But more to the point, they are unconscious, unknowing, unaware of how the writing system, and its morphology and its phonology, actually work.  They are equally unconscious of their own unconsciousness, assuming their analyses are correct without investigating  them.  Because their understanding of English orthography is based on surface observations, phonological half-truths, and exceptions, it’s unscientific and misses the scientific principles at work in the spelling system.

While it’s understandable that even the most comprehensive list or curriculum would have errors or omissions, what’s unconscionable is when lauded experts perpetuate ideologies, inconsistencies and guesswork about language instead of structural, analytic linguistic science.

*               *               *

Here’s the great story Melvyn Ramsden sent me along with his corrected <sci> matrix: a seven-year-old discovered an error in the original matrix because he understood the system.  He caught an <ion> suffix in the original version, which would have rendered an impossible *<unconsciionable>.  What I love about this anecdote is that (1) it illustrates how to handle getting caught in an error (fix it, as Ramsden did, and give credit to the person who found it), and (2) it proves that a child can be made conscious of the tidy patterns that govern our orthography in ways that, apparently, the most vaunted authorities cannot.

References

Geller, M. Prefix, Root and Suffix Cards. Buffalo Grove, IL: Geller Educational Resources.

Henry, M. (2010) Unlocking Literacy: Effective Decoding & Spelling Instruction. Baltimore: Brookes Publishing Company.

Huddleston, R. (1984). Introduction to the Grammar of English. Cambridge University Press.

Moats, L. (2010). Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers. Baltimore: Brookes Publishing Company.

Rome, P. and J. Osman. (2006). The Advanced Language Tool Kit: Teaching the Structure of the English Language. Educators Publishing Service.

© Gina Cooke and LEX: Linguist-Educator Exchange, 2010


10 Comments

  1. Pete Bowers says:

    Hey Gina,

    Delighted with your latest LEX entry. It is funny how sometimes certain words do seem to pop up to help you think about them. Ironically, this bound base relates to something in my next Newsletter that grows from work in a Grade 4 class in Doha. As well, your description of the confusions that occur when we try to analyse grapheme-phoneme correspondences without first establishing the morphological structure is exactly one of the topics that I take on in that upcoming newsletter as well!

    The impetus of my take on this same issue was an attempt to point out that my emphasis on morphological instruction from the start should not be taken as a de-emphasis on instruction of orthographic phonology (grapheme-phoneme correspondences). Just the opposite is my point. One of the key reasons to teach morphology from the start is so that it is possible to teach grapheme-phoneme correspondences accurately!

    Just for fun, I’ll share some of the words and sets of words I am using to make the point that trying to teach grapheme-phoneme correspondences without first establishing morphological structure with a word sum is doomed to failure, and confusion for students and teachers.

    1) jumped, painted, used, sled
    2) been
    3) brother, hothouse; reach, react

    I’ll get into the analysis of these words in the Newsletter, but I thought I’d share them here as a preview for your readers. It’s a chance to think about how typical instruction, which fails to address morphology, would teach these words. Then compare the results to instruction that first establishes the structure of these words with word sums, and then addresses the grapheme-phoneme correspondences.

    Fascinating (there’s another one of those ‘sc’ digraphs!) how we are independently thinking about the some of the same words and word families, and some of the same graphemes when we talk address the same basic principles.

    One final thing I wanted to add to this discussion is to explicitly address underlying principle of scientific inquiry that should guide any response to your post:

    “Scientists seek the deepest structures that account for the greatest number of cases.”

    With that as a guiding principle, we get to ignore who is right and who is wrong, and just ask, which description meets these criteria best? The credentials or expertise of a linguist is irrelevant in terms of which analysis is right. If a 7-year-old offers morphological analysis that gets at the deepest structures that account for the greatest number of cases, any other analysis is simply wrong.

    Thanks for this great food for thought!

    Pete

  2. Thanks, Pete.

    You make an excellent point about the necessity of teaching morphemic structure in order to make any sense of orthographic phonology. You also make an excellent point about how science works: the age, identity and expertise of the scientist doesn’t matter; it’s the quality and economy of the scientific analysis that matters.

    Well put!

  3. As well as being represented by a matrix, the morphological family of the fecund bound base element ‘sci’ can also be represented as a lexical word net.

    The Real Spelling Tool Box 2 offers an animated version of such a net that traces pathways through it that construct many of the words that you mention. Your readers may download that animated version from this link.

    https://files.me.com/spelling/4d6xux.mov

    If I may add a further anecdote to that about the seven-year old orthographic sleuth, here’s one about an event in a fourth grade class in Singapore a few years ago.

    I was invited to work for half an hour or so with the students of Alice Early, an excellent teacher who knows what the English spelling system really is, so her class was orthographically fertile ground.

    As the word science had been written on the board, I chose that as the launching pad for our investigation. The class analysed science with ease, noted the that the base was bound and that it was pronounced in various ways in different derivations, and were able to represent those pronunciations in IPA.

    The jaws of the observing teachers dropped as students deduced the meaning of omniscience from carnivorous / herbivorous / omnivorous (there is, then, some use in these interminable projects on dinosaurs!), while another student raised some smiles by commenting that prescience could be quite useful for doing the lottery.

    There was, though, one student who, to all appearances, was elsewhere during the lesson – yawning occasionally or examining a distant cloud through the window. At the conclusion of the lesson, as was my practice, I invited students to pose questions. At this point, our young student raised a hand and rather nonchalantly said to me, “Does this mean, then, that if you are ‘omniscient’ you just have to be ‘prescient’ too?”

    The pedagogic jaws dropped even further at this comment, partly because there were certainly some among them who did not actually understand the question, but mainly at the perspicacity of a student who had appeared to be completely unconscious of what had been going on.

    Compared with such classes of young orthographers taught by conscientious teachers, the glaring and pervasive nescience of “lauded experts” is unbearable.

  4. Melvyn,

    I am no longer surprised by the sense children can make of spelling! Thanks for that wonderful tale.

    Gina

  5. […] word matrix. (I have written about this base before, and you can read about it and see its matrix here.) They remarked, as I had, that we had not included the word discipline in our matrix or […]

  6. […] curricula, as well as the “research” base it relies on. I’ve written about other linguistic errors in some of their other writings, too. One of them says in that same 2005 article that <hear> […]

  7. Kris Clark says:

    I know this is an old post, but I am wondering … wouldn’t “scire” generally give us an English base of ? I am thinking that is a connecting vowel here.

  8. Kris Clark says:

    Crud. I hate the disappearing angle brackets. Let me try it in quotes. Is the “i” in “sci” a connecting vowel since “scire” would normally give us a base of “sc”?

  9. Lisa Barnett says:

    I would love to see the animated lexical word net that was linked in Real Spelling’s comment but when clicking on it it takes me to my iCloud account. I have the Tool Box 2 Kit –so a guide to which lesson it can be found in would also work. Thanks!

  10. Lisa Barnett says:

    I am an ‘old-school paper junky’— I tend to process what is written best if I can highlight the text while reading. I “read” this on my computer screen yesterday. It weighed heavily on my conscience all night. I needed to see a printed copy to absorb it more deeply….so glad I did! There is much to say but not enough time to do so. I will take time to write a few of things though and apologize in advance for less than thorough thoughts.
    First, I LOVE these types of posts — giving new evidence to old or uninformed works — there is so much logic to understanding the orthographic system.
    Secondly, because of this post, the final gear seems to have clicked in place in my mind about phonemes not crossing morphological boundaries. I thought I understood it, but now realize the depth of my understanding today has deepened.
    Thirdly, and lastly because I’m out of time, not out of ideas/thought, is that I’ve been struggling to come up with a word to describe a place the dyslexia community is in and needs to go. This post reminded me of such a word. Decoding Dyslexia and others around the world have been successfully raising awareness of dyslexia for the past few years. It is time to change the phrase to ‘raise the consciousness of education’ to meet the needs of all learners.

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