Denominalization

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The linguistic process by which a noun is transformed into a word of a different grammatical category, typically a verb or adjective, thereby changing its function within a sentence
2. A mechanism in language where elements originally classified as nouns are converted into verbs or adjectives, altering their syntactic roles
3. The derivational operation that changes a noun into another part of speech, such as a verb or adjective, facilitating new grammatical or semantic uses in communication

Etymology: "Denominalization" is a technical coinage built from familiar parts, so its history is simple. The prefix "de-" (from Latin, meaning "reversal" or "removal") is attached to "nominal," which is itself the adjective form of "noun," and the suffix "-ization" turns the whole thing into a noun naming a process. Read literally, the word means something like "the undoing of nominalization," where a nominalization is a term in which a verb or adjective has been turned into a noun. The word is used in linguistics and grammar. In that field, "denominalization" names the reverse of the change that turns a noun into a verb, so that "to bottle" comes from "bottle" and the process of forming such verbs can be described as denominal. The word therefore sits one step further from its root than its parts suggest: it is a term about a term-forming process, built from a neighbor of the word "noun" rather than from "noun" itself.

Synonyms: verbification, verbing, conversion, derivation, functional shift