English
Pronunciation
Verb
bleaching
Noun
bleaching (plural bleachings)
- The process of removing stains or of whitening fabrics, especially by the use of chemical agents.
- The loss or removal of part of the (semantic, grammatical, etc) content or a word or morpheme.
- Coordinate term: desemanticization
- 2000, Frederick J. Newmeyer, Language Form and Language Function, MIT Press (→ISBN), page 249:
- Grammaticalization is often associated with 'semantic bleaching', and this 'bleaching' is the result of reanalysis […] But there is no evidence that the bleaching of the meaning of do played any role in the causation of this sequence of events.
- 2009, Vit Bubenik, John Hewson, Sarah Rose, Grammatical Change in Indo-European Languages: Papers presented at the workshop on Indo-European Linguistics at the XVIIIth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Montreal, 2007, John Benjamins Publishing (→ISBN), page 165:
- In the development of the prepositional phrase, which did not exist in PIE, one can see a grammaticalization based on a double bleaching. […] Many of these combinations are achieved by lexical bleaching of the grammatical element and grammatical bleaching of the lexical element, as in the prepositional phrases in (11).
- (11) French English
- en auto by car