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decategorialization. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
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English
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The demonstrative that (as in "that thing", which has the plural "those things") came to be used as a relative clause marker, and in this role lost the grammatical category of number, hence "the thing that I know" and "the things that I know".
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Noun
decategorialization (uncountable)
- 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.
- Coordinate term: desemanticization
- 2006, Kjell Magne Yri (University of Oslo), "Decategorialization of Nouns as Postpositions in Sidaamú ʔafó and Amharic", in Lutz Edzard, Jan Retsö, Current Issues in the Analysis of Semitic Grammar and Lexicon II: Oslo-Göteborg Cooperation 4th-5th November 2005, Otto Harrassowitz Verlag (→ISBN), page 116:
- 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.