Revised version of a paper presented at the Caribbean Linguistics Conference, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, April 1971; research assisted by a grant from the Ford Foundation for the Dialect Survey of Guyana. (DD)

Investigation of data from many languages has the following results: (1) the characteristics of classifier languages are distinguished, and four types identified; (2) defining criteria are postulated for classifiers, and it is discovered that every classifier is composed of one or more out of seven categories of classification. (CHK)

Research on which portions of this study are based was performed under a National Science Foundation Grant and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. (VM)