Classifiers in Southeast Asian Languages

Classifiers are one of the types of nominal classifications systems that help speakers to identify discourse referents. They are commonly found in Southeast Asian languages, which motivates the geographical focus of this chapter. Given the semantic as well as the morphosyntactic overlap between the various systems, classifiers devices are first presented in the context of all systems of nominal classifications. Then, the analysis focuses on the different constructional subtypes of classifiers and discusses their origin along with how they are used by speakers in discourse.