Subcategorization
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Placing something into a subcategory. countable, uncountable
- 2 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. countable, uncountable
"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 constituents) (82) which it permits within the (minimal) X-bar containing it The subcategorisation frame for X will simply be an unordered list of the sets of categories which X permits as its Complements: we assume that the relative ordering of X and its Complements will be determined by independent principles (e.g. the HEAD FIRST PRINCIPLE)."
Example
More examples"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 constituents) (82) which it permits within the (minimal) X-bar containing it The subcategorisation frame for X will simply be an unordered list of the sets of categories which X permits as its Complements: we assume that the relative ordering of X and its Complements will be determined by independent principles (e.g. the HEAD FIRST PRINCIPLE)."
Etymology
From sub- + categorization.
More for "subcategorization"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.