Rebracketing

Common card · No. 322231

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". Technically, bracketing is the process of breaking an utterance into its constituent parts. The term is akin to parsing for larger sentences, but it is normally restricted to morphological processes at the sublexical...

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