grammaticalize

Verb

grammaticalize (third-person singular simple present grammaticalizes, present participle grammaticalizing, simple past and past participle grammaticalized)

1. (transitive) To make grammatical.
   • Enhanced output arises when learners grammaticalize their output either through the use of more advanced interlanguage forms or of target language forms.1999, Rod Ellis, Learning a Second Language through Interaction, John Benjamins Publishing, →ISBN, page 174
   • It is only later that learners begin to grammaticalize their speech. According to N. Ellis (1996), they do this by extracting rules from the items they have learned—bootstrapping their way to grammar.2001, Eli Hinkel, Sandra Fotos, New Perspectives on Grammar Teaching in Second Language Classrooms, Routledge, →ISBN, page 23
2. (transitive) To integrate into a system of grammar; to make (something such as a constraint) an element or rule of grammar, to cause (something) to be required by grammar.
   • That is, the cooccurrence restrictions do cross intervening specifications for the same feature. […] In the model, a linguistic constraint against homorganicity (which may grammaticalize constraints on motor programming) is enforced on pairs […]1993, North Eastern Linguistic Society. Meeting, Proceedings of NELS.
   • ... Udmurt, Turkish, and Yucatec Mayan to test (and critique) the hypothesis that possessives grammaticalize into definite articles.2003, George Melville Bolling, Bernard Bloch, Language
3. (transitive) To cause (a word, a suffix, etc) to undergo grammaticalization.
   • Similarly to other classifier languages in South America and elsewhere, a number of nouns grammaticalize as classifiers and are also used as derivational suffixes, e.g. *-maka 'stretch (of cloth)' (from *maka “hammock'), […]2002, Aleksandra I͡Urʹevna Aĭkhenvalʹd, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Aleksandra I︠U︡rʹevna Aĭkhenvalʹd, Language Contact in Amazonia, Oxford University Press on Demand, →ISBN, page 292
   • Items that grammaticalize become more productive in the sense that the grammaticalizing element occurs with increasingly large numebrs of categories. […] Clearly, lexicalization is far less constrained by various types of linguistic processes than grammaticalization is.2005, Laurel J. Brinton, Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Lexicalization and Language Change, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 109