Animateness and shape in classifiers*

Abstract

Scholars like Adams and Conklin (1973), Denny (1976), and Allan (1977) have maintained that ‘animateness’ and ‘shape’ are fundamental categories for classifiers. The hierarchical relation between these categories, however, has not been fully examined. The aim of this paper is to discuss whether there is an implicational universal between them. First classifiers are grouped into two types (i.e. ‘free morpheme classifiers’ and ‘bound morpheme classifiers’), and then their semantic properties are examined, focusing attention on those classifiers which are semantically differentiated via ‘animateness’ and ‘shape.’ Our findings indicate that there is no implicational universal that languages must include these two categories since some languages do not include shape-based classifiers and others do not have any classifiers of animateness. We propose, then, that only one of these semantic properties is an obligatory feature of every classifier system.