Definition:
A reinterpretation of the division between words or syntactic units (as in the development of umpire from the Middle English word noumpere).
Etymology:
Coined by linguist Otto Jespersen in Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin (1922)Examples and Observations:
- "Each child has to find out for himself, in hearing the connected speech of other people, where one word ends and the next one begins, or what belongs to the kernel and what belongs to the ending of a word, etc. In most cases he will arrive at the same analysis as the previous generation, but now and then he will put the boundaries in another place than formerly, and the new analysis may become general."
(Otto Jespersen, Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin, 1922) - "Q: What do a newt, a nickname, an uncle, an apron, and an adder have in common?
A: Earlier, these words were: an ewte, an ekename, a nuncle, a napperon, and a nadder.
Read those two sentences aloud and you can see what's going on. The indefinite article a or an is getting sandwiched to the following word and then the result is being chopped in the wrong place. Linguists call this misdivision metanalysis. It sounds so odd today that a word might change just like that. Remember, the printing press was invented just a few hundred years ago. Before that, language was strictly an oral (no, not a noral) business. People spelled phonetically. Even by his time, Shakespeare spelled his name a number of ways (Shakespear, Shakespere, Shaxper, and so on)."
(Anu Garg, The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two, Plume, 2007) - "[M]etanalysis need not . . . involve any reshaping. The
plurals peas and cherries are older than the singulars pea and cherry: formerly the longer forms were singulars like wheat or sand."
(Charles F. Hockett, A Course in Modern Linguistics, Macmillan, 1958)
Pronunciation: me-teh-NAH-le-ses
Also Known As: false splitting, juncture loss, junctural metanalysis, rebracketing, misdivision, refactorization
