#linguistics question: is there a word for words that parse ambiguously into morphemes, or that seem to but there’s actually only one that’s valid?
example of the former:
unlocked
= un+locked or unlock+ed
(in this case the two parses even have approximately the same meaning, but they need not)
example of the latter:
undecided
= un+decided; undecide + ed doesn’t work b/c undecide isn’t a free morpheme
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@chrisamaphone I suspect yours might be an misguided question, because in living language meaning drives syntax and not the opposite (as appears to be the way you constructed your examples), but I guess you should be looking somewhere between homographs and polysemes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym
