Meaning of semantic bleaching | Babel Free

Definitions

The process of a term losing its intensity over time.

uncountable, usually

Examples

“Another type of status change is semantic bleaching, where the original meaning of the word has been eroded away and generalized by heavy usage, as in words like very (originally “true”), awful (“full of awe”), terrible (“able to cause terror”).”

“Before answering the question regarding whether the Slavonic modals exhibit semantic bleaching or not, we have to describe the semantic space of modality as it is represented in three Slavonic languages.”

“It has often been observed that grammaticalization involves what can be intuitively characterised as ‘semantic bleaching’ (see the discussion of Gabelentz 1891 in Hopper and Traugott 1993:20). For example, when nouns are reanalysed as determiners, they lose inherent descriptive content; when verbs are reanalysed as auxiliaries, they lose argument structure.”

CEFR level