Fromsurface(“outward appearance”) +analysis.
surfaceanalysis (countable anduncountable,pluralsurface analyses)
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The wordbiology has a surface analysis ofbio- +-logy although it was not coined as the combination of thosecombining forms (in fact predating them). The word can validly be viewed as an example of words ending in the suffix-ology even though it was not coined as one (whereas many analogous but newer words were thus coined, such asimmunology). |
- (linguistics) Anysynchronically validanalysis of a word’smorphology regardless of whether it represents itsdiachronicetymology, that is, itshistorical origin.
2013, S. Armstrong, Kenneth W. Church, Pierre Isabelle, Sandra Manzi, Evelyne Tzoukermann, David Yarowsky,Natural Language Processing Using Very Large Corpora,→ISBN:Class guessers for the Xerox tagger assign potential POS [part-of-speech] tags to unknown words according to asurface analysis of the word form. In addition to the common practice of mapping POS tags according to the words’ suffixes, this implementation makes use of the case of the initial letter of a word, which is highly significant for POS assignment in German.
- Used other than figuratively or idiomatically:seesurface,analysis.
synchronic analysis of a word’s morphology
