preferred direction of linguistic change and that a grammatical item is much less likely to move backwards rather than forwards on Hopper & Traugott's cline of grammaticalization. In the words of Bernd Heine, "grammaticalization is a unidirectional process, that is, it leads from less grammatical to more grammatical forms and constructions". That is one of the strongest claims about grammaticalization, and is often cited as one of its basic principles. In addition, unidirectionality refers to a general developmental orientation which all (or the large majority) of the cases of grammaticalization have in common, and which can be paraphrased in abstract, general terms, independent of any specific case. The idea of unidirectionality is an important one when trying to predict language change through grammaticalization (and for making the claim that grammaticalization can be predicted). Lessau notes that "unidirectionality in itself is a predictive assertion in that it selects the general type of possible development (it predicts the direction of any given incipient case)," and unidirectionality also rules out an entire range of development types that do not follow this principle, hereby limiting the amount of possible paths of development. Counterexamples (degrammaticalization) Although unidirectionality is a key element of grammaticalization, exceptions exist. Indeed, the possibility of counterexamples, coupled with their rarity, is given as evidence for the general operating principle of unidirectionality. According to Lyle Campbell, however, advocates often minimize the counterexamples or redefine them as not being part of the grammaticalization cline. He gives the example of Hopper and Traugott (1993), who treat some putative counterexamples as cases of lexicalization in which a grammatical form is incorporated into a lexical item but does not itself become a lexical item. An example is the phrase to up the ante, which incorporates the preposition up (a function word) in a verb (a content word) but without up becoming a verb outside of this lexical item. Since it is the entire phrase to up the ante that is the verb, Hopper and Traugott argue that the word up itself cannot be said to have degrammaticalized, a view that is challenged to some extent by parallel usages such as to up the bid, to up the payment, to up the deductions, to up the medication, by the fact that in all cases the can be replaced by a possessive (my, your, her, Bill's, etc.), and by further extensions still: he upped his game 'he improved