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Here, she took her inspiration from the Yugoslav linguist Petar Guberina whose life’s work had been to analyze the processes of speech in order to teach deaf people to speak.²⁴¹ Units of meaning in speech are closely aligned with breathing – sounding while breathing out, punctuated by pauses while the speaker breathes in. These elemental units Masterman called “phrasing.”²⁴² Speech is connected with body in a multimodality this primordial, this visceral.

Working now at the level of phrasing, Guberina and now Masterman uncovered the patterning of meaning in phrases which could be illustrated as “semantic squares.” Multidimensionally cross-cutting meanings that might be represented as such, with arrows crossing squares, were in speech turned into linear phrase units. Across the coordinates of a phrase conceived two-dimensionally, and between phrases from square to square, there are patterns of contrast, recapitulation, reiteration, synthesis. and modification. Guberina wanted to understand the underlying logic of these patterns in order to teach deaf people to speak. Anticipating computer applications, these Masterman called “semantic algorithms.”²⁴³

In order to represent the constituent elements of breath groups, Masterman proposed an “ideographic language,” a notation for concepts. This was reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s “picture language.” Masterman had written up the notes of Wittgenstein’s 1933–34 lectures for his Blue Book. It was also reminiscent of Halliday’s early work on Chinese. To the extent that the unit of meaning in a computer is an n-gram – not an isolable grapheme in the case of alphabetic text, or a phoneme in the case of speech – this prediction of hers has come true. She made this proposition in 1953, the only woman in a collection, British Philosophers in the Mid-Century.

As for ideography, units of meaning are just as easily represented today as an image (emojis,^§AS1.1.1a diagrams, and images, for instance). The elementary n-grams are images of clustered characters in text, and speech is made up of clustered sounds. Almost nothing meaningful is happening at the level of graphemes or phonemes. To this extent, Masterman says, “English is like Chinese, and both are like metaphysics.”²⁴⁴

Which we would rephrase as: The elementary unit of meaning in English and Chinese are sound collocations, transposable into collocations of graphemes in text (though never with quite the same meaning), transposable into iconic or symbolic image (again never with the same meaning), and so on across forms of meaning. All are tied together for the purposes of mechanical retrieval and transmission in ontologies and metaontologies^§MS3.4 – the metaphysics of our times. This is how speech-to-text transposition works today, mechanically speaking. This is how our world of digital meaning works.

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²³⁹ Dan I. Slobin, 1996, “From “Thought and Language” to “Thinking for Speaking,” pp. 70–96 in Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, edited by J.J. Gumperz and S.C. Levinson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 76.

²⁴⁰ Margaret Masterman, 2005, Language, Cohesion and Form, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 266.

²⁴¹ Petar Guberina, 1964 [1971], “Studies in the Verbo-Tonal System,” Columbus, OH: Department of Speech, Ohio State University.

²⁴² Margaret Masterman, 2005, Language, Cohesion and Form, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 227–53.

²⁴³ Ibid., pp. 270–74.

²⁴⁴ Margaret Masterman, 1957, “Metaphysical and Ideographic Language,” pp. 283–360 in British Philosophy in the Mid-Century, edited by C.A. Mace, London: George Allen and Unwin, pp. 309–10.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 100–101. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Margaret Masterman’s “Breath Groups” §AS1.4.1b