subcategorization
subcategorization noun: placing something into a subcategory.
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 subcategorization
| plural | subcategorizations |
|---|---|
| alternative form | subcategorisation |
Origin of subcategorization
From sub- + categorization.
Questions about subcategorization
- What does subcategorization mean?
- Subcategorization means placing something into a subcategory.
- What part of speech is subcategorization?
- Subcategorization is a noun.
- What is the plural of subcategorization?
- The plural of subcategorization is subcategorizations.
Words near subcategorization in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: 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: “subcategorization.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/subcategorization. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.