decategorialization
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
32
Scrabble Score
19
Letters
8
Syllables
12
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The loss of morphosyntactic properties that may have been characteristic of a word's initial grammatical class (category), but are not relevant to its current grammatical function; the loss of membership in a certain grammatical class.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "Within grammaticalization theory it is generally accepted that the process is unidirectional; Ns (nouns) can develop into Pops (postpositions), but not vice versa. The concept of decategorialization applies to the extent to which e.g. the Ns cease to survive as Ns, and survive only as Pops during and after the grammaticalization process."