wrote that "semantic reduction, or bleaching, occurs as a morpheme loses its intention: From describing a narrow set of ideas, it comes to describe an ever broader range of them, and eventually may lose its meaning altogether". He saw this as one of the two kinds of change that are always associated with grammaticalization (the other being phonetic reduction).

For example, both English suffixes -ly (as in bodily and angrily), and -like (as in catlike or yellow-like) ultimately come from an earlier Proto-Germanic etymon, *lika,