Let us look a couple of these classifiers in a little detail. The suffix khan is generally used after nouns indicating something broad and flat although there are other uses [Kak72]. Goswami says that khan is used for things which are generally flat, square or rectangular irrespective of whether they are big or small, long or short. We call the use of the classifier khan with a physical entity which is ideally broad and flat, the ideal use or the ideal meaning. We borrow the concept of ideal meaning from Herskovits who uses them in her study of English prepositions [Her86]. We feel that each shape-based classifier in Assamese can be given an ideal meaning. Uses of a classifier that do not conform to the ideal meaning can be understood in terms of schematization. In other words, we follow discussions by Herskovits [Her86,Her95] who says spatial prepositions such as on, at and in have ideal meanings. Uses of such prepositions that do not completely agree with the ideal usage can be described in terms of adaptations of ideal meanings to specific situations based on schematization.