A Grammar of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT)

Classifiers are morphemic handshapes that reflect certain semantic properties of the represented entity. These properties are form-related, and because of that, classifiers are often highly iconic. Note, however, that there is no one-to-one relationship between entities and classifiers – in other words, one and the same entity can be represented by multiple different classifiers, which can also be of a different type (e.g. handling vs. entity), and vice versa: the same classifier can refer to various entities. Related to this, it is important to note that classifiers can lexicalize, which means that some signs have evolved from classifier predicates and now have a fixed form-meaning relationship. In this chapter, the focus lies on the productive ways the classifier handshapes are used.

There is much debate on the categorization of classifiers in terms of morphological processes (e.g. inflectional or derivational), which is the main reason why they are addressed in a separate chapter. It is, however, clear that they form a closed-class grammatical category in NGT, and that they function like affixes.

There are several types of classifiers. A common distinction is made between entity classifiers, bodypart classifiers, handling classifiers, and size-and-shape specifiers. The first three are addressed in MORPHOLOGY 5.1, the last category is focused upon in MORPHOLOGY 5.2.