Subcategorization
Encyclopedia
Subcategorization is a natural language phenomenon, which denotes the tendency of heads
to have restrictions on the arguments they can take. For example, some verbs do not take a noun-phrase complement, while some verbs do take a complement, or even two complements (in some theories), typically cast in traditional grammar as (direct and indirect objects). The name subcategorization comes from the fact that the category of a head can be divided into finer-grained subcategories of different types of each head based on the arguments they take.
Head (linguistics)
In linguistics, the head is the word that determines the syntactic type of the phrase of which it is a member, or analogously the stem that determines the semantic category of a compound of which it is a component. The other elements modify the head....
to have restrictions on the arguments they can take. For example, some verbs do not take a noun-phrase complement, while some verbs do take a complement, or even two complements (in some theories), typically cast in traditional grammar as (direct and indirect objects). The name subcategorization comes from the fact that the category of a head can be divided into finer-grained subcategories of different types of each head based on the arguments they take.