surface analysis

surface as a noun adjunct in its sense "figuratively superficial" + analysis

surface analysis (countable and uncountable, plural surface analyses)

1. (linguistics) Any valid analysis of a word's morphology regardless of whether it represents its etymology in the strict sense of that word (that is, the historical origin); for example, 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).
   • 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.

• surface etymology

• folk etymology
• reanalysis
• rebracketing

surface as a noun adjunct in its physical sense + analysis

surface analysis (countable and uncountable, plural surface analyses)

1. (surface science, materials science) The analysis of a physical surface (uncountable) or any instance of such analysis (countable).
   • 2003, O'Connor, John; Sexton, Brett; Smart, Roger S.C., Surface Analysis Methods in Materials Science, 2nd edition, →ISBN:

     This guide to the use of surface analysis techniques, now in its second edition, has expanded to include more techniques, current applications and updated references. It outlines the application of surface analysis techniques to a broad range of studies in materials science and engineering.