In
linguistics, particularly
linguistic morphology
In linguistics, morphology () is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morph ...
, bracketing is a term of art that refers to how an
utterance can be represented as a hierarchical tree of constituent parts. Analysis techniques based on bracketing are used at different levels of
grammar, but are particularly associated with morphologically complex words.
To give an example of bracketing in
English, consider the word ''uneventful''. This word is made of three parts, the prefix ''un-'', the root ''event'', and the suffix ''-ful''. An English speaker should have no trouble parsing this word as "lacking in significant events". However, imagine a foreign linguist with access to a dictionary of English roots and affixes, but only a superficial understanding of English grammar. Conceivably, he or she could understand ''uneventful'' as one of:
* "not eventful", where ''eventful'' in turn means "full of events"
* "full of unevents", where ''unevent'' in turn means "something different from or opposite to an event"
We can represent these two understandings of ''uneventful'' with the ''bracketings''
and
, respectively. Here, bracketing gives the linguist a convenient technique for representing the different ways to parse the word, and for forming hypotheses about why the word is parsed the way it is by speakers of the language.
Since bracketing represents a hierarchical tree, it is associated to some extent with
generative grammar. Some theories in
cognitive linguistics rely on the idea that bracketing represents to some degree of accuracy how listeners parse complex utterances (e.g.
level ordering). In
computational linguistics
Computational linguistics is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, comput ...
, rules for how a program should parse a word can be represented in terms of possible bracketings.
It is not completely clear that bracketing accurately represents the structure of utterances. In particular, there are
bracketing paradox In linguistic morphology, the bracketing paradox concerns morphologically complex words which have more than one analysis, or ''bracketing'', e.g., one for phonology and one for semantics, and the two are not compatible, or brackets do not align.
...
es that challenge this idea. However, there is some evidence for bracketing, such as the creation of new words via ''rebracketing''.
Rebracketing
''Rebracketing'' is a type of
folk etymology
Folk etymology (also known as popular etymology, analogical reformation, reanalysis, morphological reanalysis or etymological reinterpretation) is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more famili ...
that can result in the creation of new words. An often cited example in English is certain common
nicknames that begin with ''N'', where the given name does not begin with ''N'' (e.g. ''Ned'' for ''Edward'', ''Nelly'' for ''Ellen''). In
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
, the first person
possessive pronoun
A possessive or ktetic form (Glossing abbreviation, abbreviated or ; from la, possessivus; grc, κτητικός, translit=ktētikós) is a word or grammatical construction used to indicate a relationship of possession (linguistics), possessio ...
was ''
mīn''. Old English speakers commonly addressed family and close friends with "min <Name>", for example, "min Ed". Over time, the pronoun shifted from ''min'' to ''mi''
[This shift was never complete. In Modern English, we still have ''mine'' in addition to ''my'', used in different contexts.] and children learning the language rebracketed the utterance /mined/ from the original "min Ed" (