Grammaticalizing

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The process by which words or constructions evolve to serve grammatical functions rather than lexical ones, such as turning nouns into tense markers or pronouns into agreement markers
2. The linguistic change involving the transition of lexical items into grammatical elements that express relationships between words in a sentence
3. The development in language where independent words or phrases gradually become bound morphemes or grammatical markers indicating tense, aspect, mood, or syntactic relationships

Etymology: The word "grammaticalizing" is the present participle of "grammaticalize", a verb that was formed by stripping the ending off "grammaticalization" and reading what remained as a base. Such a reversal, called a back-formation, is how English often produces verbs from nouns that end in "-ation" or "-ization": "donation" gives "donate", for instance. The noun came first, and the verb followed from it. The noun is built from the adjective "grammatical", which goes back to the Latin "grammaticus" and the Greek "grammatikos", meaning "of letters" or "of writing", from "gramma", a letter. The suffix "-ize" supplies the sense of making something become a certain kind of thing, so "grammaticalize" describes a word turning into grammar. The process it names is the one in which a word such as the English "going to", reduced in speech to "gonna", ends up as a future marker rather than a verb of motion.

Synonyms: formalizing grammar, standardizing, systematizing, regularizing, syntax structuring

Antonyms: disorganizing, deranging, ungrammaticalizing