Word.ws English Dictionary

obligatorification

obligatorification noun: the act or process of, or an instance of, (something) becoming or being made (more) obligatory, especially as part of the process of grammaticalization.

Noun

obligatorification (countable and uncountable, plural obligatorifications)

  1. The act or process of, or an instance of, (something) becoming or being made (more) obligatory, especially as part of the process of grammaticalization.
    • Following Jakobson 1959 [1972] and Lehmann 1982 [1995], grammaticalization for most observers always entails obligatorification. As Jakobson memorably put it, languages differ not in what they can say, but in what they must: [...]2011, John Haiman, Cambodian: Khmer, →ISBN, page 137
    • Mandarin and Khmer and possibly other Southeast Asian languages may be characterized as resisting obligatorification of their meaningful morphology. Could this have anything to do with their penchant for decorative morphology?2013, Jeffrey P. Williams, The Aesthetics of Grammar: Sound and Meaning in the Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia, →ISBN, page 79

Synonyms of obligatorification

Forms of obligatorification

pluralobligatorifications

Origin of obligatorification

From obligatory + -ification.

Questions about obligatorification

What does obligatorification mean?
Obligatorification means the act or process of, or an instance of, (something) becoming or being made (more) obligatory, especially as part of the process of grammaticalization.
What part of speech is obligatorification?
Obligatorification is a noun.
What is the plural of obligatorification?
The plural of obligatorification is obligatorifications.

Words near obligatorification in the dictionary

  1. obligations
  2. obligative
  3. obligativeness
  4. obligato
  5. obligator
  6. obligatorification
  7. obligatorifications
  8. obligatorily
  9. obligatoriness
  10. obligatorization
  11. obligatorizations

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: obligatorification (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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