rebracketing
Sign in to saveAlso known as re-bracketing, resegmentation, metanalysis, reanalysis, re-analysis
Rebracketing (also known as resegmentation or metanalysis) is a process in historical linguistics where a word originally derived from one set of morphemes is broken down or bracketed into a different set. For example, hamburger, originally from Hamburg+er, has been rebracketed into ham+burger, and burger was later reused as a productive morpheme in coinages such as cheeseburger. It is usually a form of folk etymology, or may seem to be the result of valid morphological processes.
~20 min read
Article
19 sectionsContents
- Role in forming new words
- Creation of productive affixes
- Examples
- Examples of false splitting
- In English
- In French
- In Dutch
- In Arabic
- In Greek
- Examples of juncture loss
- From Arabic "al"
- Spanish
- Medieval Latin
- Other
- In Greek
- See also
- Notes
- References
- External links
Rebracketing (also known as resegmentation or metanalysis) is a process in historical linguistics where a word originally derived from one set of morphemes is broken down or bracketed into a different set. For example, hamburger, originally from Hamburg+er, has been rebracketed into ham+burger, and burger was later reused as a productive morpheme in coinages such as cheeseburger. It is usually a form of folk etymology, or may seem to be the result of valid morphological processes.
Rebracketing often focuses on highly probable word boundaries: "a noodle" might become "an oodle", since "an oodle" sounds just as grammatically correct as "a noodle", and likewise "an eagle" might become "a neagle", but "the bowl" would not become "th ebowl" and "a kite" would not become "ak ite".