decategorialize

decategorialize

English

Verb

decategorialize (third-person singular simple present decategorializes, present participle decategorializing, simple past and past participle decategorialized)

1. To undergo decategorialization.
   • 1997, Joan L. Bybee, John Haiman, Sandra A. Thompson, Essays on Language Function and Language Type: Dedicated to T. Givón, John Benjamins Publishing (→ISBN), page 56:

     […] in which the lexeme begins to "decategorialize" (Heine et al. 1991), i.e. to lose the morphosyntactic behaviors characteristic of its original category. For example, in the English relator noun construction on top of NP, top, while clearly a noun  […]

   • 2010, Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Graeme Trousdale, Gradience, Gradualness and Grammaticalization, John Benjamins Publishing (→ISBN), page 75:

     A grammaticalizing item decategorializes (Hopper 1991), losing membership of its source category. As a result of high frequency, it may become independently entrenched (Bybee 2006), receiving a kind of categorial autonomy, […]