bleaching

verb

1. (form-of, gerund, participle, present)present participle and gerund of bleach

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)The process of removing stains or of whitening fabrics, especially by the use of chemical agents.
2. (countable, uncountable)The loss or removal of part of the (semantic, grammatical, etc) content or a word or morpheme.

   “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.”

   “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”