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.
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").
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.
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.[2] Many productive affixes have been created by rebracketing, such as -athon from Marathon, -holic from alcoholic, and so on.
The results include the following words in English: In French similar confusion arose between "le/la" and "l'-" as well as "de" and "d'-".
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.