 Semantic bleaching, or desemanticization, has been seen from early on as a characteristic of grammaticalization.It can be described as the loss of semantic content.More specifically, with reference to grammaticalization, bleaching refers to the loss of all (or most) lexical content of an entity while only its grammatical content is retained, for example James Matisoff described bleaching as "the partial effacement of a morpheme's semantic features, the stripping away of some of its precise content so it can be used in an abstracter, grammatical-hardware-like way".