verb

• Change (an element) from being one having lexical meaning into one having a largely grammatical function.

  ‘we cannot assume that such notions will necessarily be grammaticalized in the structure of any particular language’

  More example sentences

  • ‘The lexical items that become grammaticalized must first serve commonly needed discourse functions.’
  • ‘The fact that concepts are grammaticalized differently in different languages is a major problem for translation, especially for machine translation.’