What is "bracketing"

Bracket \Brack"et\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Bracketed; p. pr. & vb. n. Bracketing]

1. To place within brackets; to connect by brackets; to furnish with brackets.

2. (Gunnery) To shoot so as to establish a bracket for (an object).

Bracketing \Brack"et*ing\, n. (Arch.) A series or group of brackets; brackets, collectively.

n. 1 (context architecture English) A series or group of brackets; brackets, collectively. 2 The act of enclosing (text, etc.) in brackets. vb. (present participle of bracket English)

In photography, bracketing is the general technique of taking several shots of the same subject using different camera settings. Bracketing is useful and often recommended in situations that make it difficult to obtain a satisfactory image with a single shot, especially when a small variation in exposure parameters has a comparatively large effect on the resulting image. Autobracketing is automatic bracketing by using a setting on the camera to take several bracketed shots (in contrast to the photographer altering the settings by hand between each shot). Given the time it takes to accomplish multiple shots, it is typically, but not always, used for static subjects.

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". However, imagine a foreign linguist with access to a dictionary of English roots and affixes, but only a superficial understanding of English grammar. Conceivably, he or she could understand uneventful as one of:

• "not eventful", where eventful in turn means "full of events"
• "full of unevents", where unevent in turn means "something different from or opposite to an event"

We can represent these two understandings of uneventful with the bracketings [[un-][[event][-ful]]] and [[[un-][event]][-ful]], respectively. 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. In particular, there are bracketing paradoxes that challenge this idea. However, there is some evidence for bracketing, such as the creation of new words via rebracketing.

Bracketing may refer to:

• Bracketing, a photographic technique
  • Autobracketing, a camera feature for taking multiple shots with different settings
• Bracketing (linguistics), a term in morphological analysis
  • Rebracketing, breaking a word into constituent parts inconsistent with its original etymology
• Bracketing (phenomenology), a method used by phenomenological sociologists
• Bracketing, a method for determining range by firing artillery shells both beyond and short of a target
• Inclusio, a literary device
• Bracketing, an economics term

Bracketing (; also called epoché, transcendental reduction, or phenomenological reduction) is a term in the philosophical movement of phenomenology describing the act of suspending judgment about the natural world to instead focus on analysis of experience.