American Sign Language - Classifiers

Classifiers

Sign languages exhibit the use of polymorphemic constructions referred to as classifiers (not all researchers term these constructions classifiers). These constructions can convey shape, size, motion, location, movement, stative-descriptive, and/or handling information. These constructions are highly inflectable. There have been few studies on how frequent classifiers are used in ASL. Ranging from 4.2% to 7.68% in a corpus study. The nature of classifiers and their constructions allows the speaker to use them more frequently in narratives; one study found this to be 17.7%. Classifiers are highly iconic.