In linguistics, particularly linguistic morphology, 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".
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, 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.
However, there is some evidence for bracketing, such as the creation of new words via rebracketing.
Rebracketing is a type of folk etymology that can result in the creation of new words.
Over time, the pronoun shifted from min to mi[3] and children learning the language rebracketed the utterance /mined/ from the original "min Ed" (