subcategorization

Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word subcategorization. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word subcategorization, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say subcategorization in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word subcategorization you have here. The definition of the word subcategorization will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofsubcategorization, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.

English

English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia

Alternative forms

Etymology

From sub- +‎ categorization.

Noun

subcategorization (countable and uncountable, plural subcategorizations)

  1. Placing something into a subcategory.
  2. (grammar) The practice of specifying what types of complements a word may take when that word acts as the head of a phrase of a certain category; this specification restricts the wordʼs category, making it smaller, hence a “subcategory” of the wordʼs category.
    • 1988, Andrew Radford, chapter 7, in Transformational grammar: a first course, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 365:
      It seems a simple enough matter to extract a general principle of subcategorisation out of (81), along the lines of:
      (82)      SUBCATEGORISATION PRINCIPLE
      (82)      Any lexical item of category X will be subcategorised with respect
      (82)      to the range of idiosyncratic Complements (i.e. sister constituents)
      (82)      which it permits within the (minimal) X-bar containing it
      The subcategorisation frame for X will simply be an unordered list of the sets of categories which X permits as its Complements: we assume that the relative ordering of X and its Complements will be determined by independent principles (e.g. the HEAD FIRST PRINCIPLE).