subcategorisation
subcategorisation is the alternative form of subcategorization.
Meaning of subcategorization
Noun
subcategorization (countable and uncountable, plural subcategorizations)
- Placing something into a subcategory.
- The practice of specifying what types of complements a word may take when that word acts as the head of a phrase of a certain category; this specification restricts the wordʼs category, making it smaller, hence a “subcategory” of the wordʼs category.
- It seems a simple enough matter to extract a general principle of subcategorisation out of (81), along the lines of:
(82) SUBCATEGORISATION PRINCIPLE
(82) Any lexical item of category X will be subcategorised with respect
(82) to the range of idiosyncratic Complements (i.e. sister...1988, Andrew Radford, chapter 7, in Transformational grammar: a first course, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 365
- It seems a simple enough matter to extract a general principle of subcategorisation out of (81), along the lines of:
Forms of subcategorisation
| plural | subcategorisations |
|---|
Questions about subcategorisation
- What is subcategorisation the alternative form of?
- Subcategorisation is the alternative form of subcategorization.
Words near subcategorisation in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: subcategorisation (page history and authors); subcategorization (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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Cite this entry: “subcategorisation.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/subcategorisation. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.