 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.