Degrammaticalize

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To make less grammatical or not grammatical. transitive
  2. 2
    To cause (an inflectional ending, etc) to undergo degrammaticalization. transitive

    "Using diachronic evidence from Swedish, I will show that inflectional endings may be maintained as “less cumulative” inflections, or even degrammaticalize into a derivational suffix or a clitic."

Synonyms

All synonyms
degrammaticizedegrammatize

Example

More examples

"Using diachronic evidence from Swedish, I will show that inflectional endings may be maintained as “less cumulative” inflections, or even degrammaticalize into a derivational suffix or a clitic."

Etymology

From de- + grammaticalize.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.