Reanalysis and Restructuring
Helmut Weiß
March 2025 

Reanalysis is held to be one of the most important mechanisms in language change. In one tradition, reanalysis is defined as a change in the structure of expressions, i.e., as restructuring that is achieved by changes in the boundaries that separate linguistic units like morphemes, words, syntactic constituents, or clauses. Boundaries between these units can be shifted, lost, created, weakened, or strengthened. The New High German word gleich ‘same, equal’, for example, evolved from a bimorphemic word (Middle High German gelīch) through the loss of the morpheme boundary, and the place name Zwieselburg (a town in Austria) changed to Wieselburg as its initial z was reanalyzed as a preposition – a case of creation of a word boundary. There are two major triggers for reanalysis: first, structural ambiguities that may arise, for example, when there are differences in the structuring on different linguistic levels like the prosodic or the morpheme structure; second, analogy where reanalysis is motivated by similarity with other existing forms.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008849 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Diachronic Linguistics, eds. Adam Ledgeway, Edith Aldridge, Anne Breitbarth, Katalin É. Kiss, Joseph Salmons & Alexandra Simonenko. Forthcoming.
keywords:	reanalysis, restructuring, boundary shift, loss, creation, weakening, strengthening, structural ambiguity, analogy, syntax, morphology, diachrony
previous versions:	v2 [February 2025] v1 [October 2024]
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