Rebracketing

Rebracketing (also known as resegmentation or metanalysis) is a process in historical linguistics where a word originally derived from one source is broken down or bracketed into a different set of factors. It is usually a form of folk etymology, where the new factors may appear meaningful (e.g. "hamburger" taken to mean a "burger" with "ham"), 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 level, i.e. within the particular word or lexeme. For example, the word "uneventful" is conventionally bracketed as [un+[event+ful]], and the bracketing [[un+event]+ful] leads to completely different [[semantics]]. Re-bracketing is the process of seeing the same word as a different morphological decomposition, especially where the new [[etymology]] becomes the conventional norm. The name false splitting, also called misdivision, in particular is often reserved for the case where two words mix but still remain two words (as in the "noodle" and "eagle" examples above).
The name juncture loss may be specially deployed to refer to the case of an article and a noun fusing (such as if "the jar" were to become "(the) thejar" or "an apple" were to become "(an) anapple"). Loss of [[juncture]] is especially common in the cases of [[loanword]]s and loan phrases in which the recipient language's speakers at the time of the word's introduction did not realize an article to be already present (e.g. numerous Arabic-derived words beginning 'al-' ('the'), including "algorithm", "alcohol", "alchemy", etc.). Especially in the case of loan phrases, juncture loss may be recognized as substandard even when widespread; e.g. "the "[[hoi polloi]]"", where Greek "hoi" = "the", and "the [[Magna Carta]]", in which no article is necessary because "magna carta" is borrowed rather than [[calque]]d (Latin's lack of articles makes the original term either implicitly definite or indeterminate with respect to definiteness [in this context, the former], and the English phrase's proper-noun status renders unnecessary any further determination through the use of an article).
As a statistical change within a language within any century, rebracketing is a very weak statistical phenomenon. Even during phonetic template shifts, it is at best only probable that 0.1% of the vocabulary may be rebracketed in any given century.
Rebracketing is part of the process of [[language change]], and often operates together with [[sound change]]s that facilitate the new etymology.
Rebracketing is sometimes used for jocular purposes, for example "psychotherapist" can be rebracketed jocularly as "Psycho the rapist", and "together in trouble" can be rebracketed jocularly as "to get her in trouble".
Role in forming new words.
Before the increased standardization of the English language in the modern period, many new words entered its lexicon in exactly the way just described. A 15th century English cook may once have said something like: "Ah, I found this ewt and this nadder in my napron while baking numble-pie." A few generations later the cook's descendant would have said: "Ah, I found this newt and this adder in my apron while baking (h)umble-pie." Over the course of time these words were misheard and resegmented: ewt became newt, nadder became adder, napron became apron, numble-pie became (h)umble pie. The force behind these particular resegmentations, and by far the most powerful force behind any such resegmentations in the English language, was the 'movable-n' of the indefinite article a(n), of the possessive pronouns my(n) and thy(n), and of the old dative case of the definite article the(n). The biforms no/none, the prepositions in and on, the conditional conjunction an 'even,' the shortened form 'n 'and,' and the inflectional endings in -n may also have played a part. Through the process of prothesis, in which the sound at the end of a word is transferred to the beginning of the word following, or conversely aphaeresis, in which the sound at the beginning of a word is transferred to the end of the word preceding, old words were resegmented and new words formed. So through prothesis an ewt became a newt. Conversely through aphaeresis a nadder became an adder, a napron became an apron, and a numble-pie became an (h)umble-pie. Many other words in the English language owe their existence to just this type of resegmentation: e.g., nickname, ninny, namby-pamby, nidiot/nidget, nonce-word, nother, and notch through prothesis of n; auger, umpire, orange, eyas, atomy, emony, ouch, and aitch-bone, through aphaeresis of n.
Examples of false splitting.
In English.
As demonstrated in the examples above, the primary reason of juncture loss in English is the confusion between "a" and "an". In [[blackletter|Medieval script]], words were often written so close together that for some [[Middle English]] scholars it was hard to tell where one began and another ended. The results include the following words in English:
In French.
In [[French language|French]] similar confusion arose between "le/la" and "l'-" as well as "de" and "d'-".
In Dutch.
Dutch shares several examples with English, but also has some of its own. Many examples were created by reanalysing an initial "n-" as part of a preceding article or case ending.
In Arabic.
In [[Arabic language|Arabic]] the confusion is generally with non-Arabic words beginning in "al-" ("al" is Arabic for "the").
Examples of juncture loss.
From Arabic "al".
Perhaps the most common case of juncture loss in English comes from the Arabic "al" (mentioned above), mostly via Spanish, Portuguese, and Medieval Latin:
In Greek.
Junctural metanalysis played a role in the development of new words in the earliest period of Greek literature: during the oral transmission of the Homeric epics. Many words in the Homeric epics that are etymologically inexplicable through normal linguistic analysis begin to make some sense when junctural metanalysis at some stage in the transmission is assumed: e.g., the formula "eche nedumos hypnos" "sweet sleep held (him)" appears to be a resegmentation of "echen edumos hypnos". Steve Reece has discovered several dozen similar instances of metanalysis in Homer, thereby shedding new light on their etymologies.
Juncture loss is common in later Greek as well, especially in place names, or in borrowings of Greek names in Italian and Turkish, where particles (εις, στην, στον, σε) are fused with the original name. In [[Cretan dialect]], the se- prefix was also found in common nouns, such as "secambo" or "tsecambo" < "se-" + "cambo" 'a plain'.
Examples:
References.
Etymology:
Dictionaries:
[[Category:Etymology]]
[[Category:Linguistic morphology]]
[[Category:Historical linguistics]]
[[Category:Semantics (linguistics)]]