Assamese, an Indo-European language of North-eastern India has a very strong system of classifiers [Kak72,Gos82]. These two authors call them definitives instead of classifiers. The function of these linguistic entities is like the function of articles in a language like English in that they are used to characterize the definiteness or indefiniteness of nominals. Dasgupta [Das83] studies the parallel phenomenon in a language called Bengali which belongs to the easternmost branch of Indo-Iranian languages just like Assamese. He presents linguistic arguments supporting the treatment of this phenomenon not as that of articles, but as that of classifiers. The same arguments can be reconstructed for Assamese also. However, Dasgupta mentions in the conclusion of his paper that the classifier system of Assamese is much richer than that of Bengali, the topic of his paper [Das83, page 24,]. He also notes that the classifier system in Assamese has never been studied at length.
Let me first motivate the concept of classifiers as seen in a language such as Assamese. In English, there is a set of two articles, viz., a and the. These are used in front of nominals to indicate if the nominal is definite or indefinite. In many languages, the article is a morpheme in the surface structure, i.e., it is an inflection which is attached generally to the noun in the nominal phrase. For example, in Assamese, the boy translates to loraa-to where loraa means boy and to means the. Here, I use a hyphen between the noun and the suffix just to show them clearly. However, the hyphen is not written in Assamese orthography.
Let us now look at the variety of ways in which the article or determiner the can be expressed in Assamese. Kakati calls them ``enclitical definitives or numeratives'' [Kak72, page 278,]. According to him they are enclitics, or ``post-positional affixes or words which are added to nouns or numerals to define the nature of the object or article referred to.'' According to Chatterjee, the doyen of modern Indian linguistics, they have the value of the definite article ``the'' [Cha26]. The extensive use of definitives is a unique feature of Assamese among all the Indo-Iranian languages. Emeneau has discussed the use of such forms in Indo-Iranian and Dravidian languages [Eme56].
The classifiers for singular and plural are different. We give example of singular classifiers only. Goswami, who calls them definitives, notes about Assamese [Gos82, page 240,]:
The singular definitives are larger in number, and besides expressing singularity or single units or definiteness, they always convey some additional sense whether an object referred to is big or small, round or flat or oblong, or in bunches or otherwise. They may also express the senses such as `respectful' or `polite' or otherwise, or also male or female of men and animals.The following table contains a list of classifiers that clearly shows the richness of the classifier system. The list of classifiers given below is not exhaustive.
We must note that in any language, enclitical classifiers are a closed class. In other words it is not possible to add to the list of classifiers in a language. Classifiers indicate how the speakers of a language characterize entities in the world based on certain salient characteristics. We are interested in studying classifiers whose selection depends on spatial characteristics, notably shape. Examples listed above give a selection of shape-based classifiers only.