Crosscategorial

Crosscategorial is an adjective used in linguistics and logic to describe approaches that treat linguistic items as capable of operating across multiple syntactic categories rather than fitting into a single fixed category. In this sense, crosscategorial frameworks aim to model how words and phrases can shift category depending on context, or how composition can occur across category boundaries. The term is not a highly standardized label, but it appears in discussions of flexible type systems, polysemy handling, and lexical entries that encode multiple category readings.

In practice, crosscategorial ideas appear in theories such as combinatory categorial grammar (CCG), where the grammar assigns types to words and combinatory rules derive larger constituents. Crosscategorial variants may extend these systems by allowing broader category assignments, multiple categories per lexical item, or category-raising operations that enable cross-category combination. Applications include natural language processing tasks that require robust handling of polysemy and coercions, as well as multilingual grammar induction and cross-domain semantics.

An example: a word like “play” can function as a noun or a verb in English. A crosscategorial treatment would encode both category readings with appropriate composition rules so that context selects the correct reading without forcing a fixed category upfront.

See also: combinatory categorial grammar, categorial grammar, type-raising, polysemy, lexical semantics.