surface analysis

English

From surface (“an outward appearance”) +‎ analysis.

surface analysis (countable and uncountable, plural surface analyses)

Examples
The word biology has a surface analysis of bio- +‎ -logy although it was not coined as the combination of those combining 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 as immunology).

(linguistics) Any synchronically valid analysis of a word’s morphology regardless of whether it represents its diachronic etymology, that is, its historical origin.
Synonym: surface etymology
- 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 a surface 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: see surface,‎ analysis.

synchronic analysis of a word’s morphology