Verbal Classifiers in Sign Languages… Are they Agreement? 1 Elena E. Benedicto Purdue University 1. Introduction Sign Languages (SLs) have a subset of predicates, called Spatial Verbs, that are used to express location and motion making use of the signing space to locate referents and locations. These verbal units are morphologically complex and are formed, among other components, of a movement (in the kinetic sense) component and a hand configuration which has been identified as classifier. The following is an example: (1) MONEYa Fa+BE_LOCx (Benedicto 2004, (25)) ‘Coins of money are located [there at x]’ In (1), the verbal predicate can be decomposed in, at least, two parts: the handshape configuration F- (as this handshape is the one used for the fingerspelling of letter F), formed by putting together the index and the thumb fingers, forming a circle, and extending the other three fingers, corresponds to the Classifier and denotes a class of entities that are round and small; the movement (-BE_LOC), a short downward movement articulated at a location in the signing space identified by the subindex x, corresponds to verbal part of the predicate (in this case, a stative locative predicate). The SL literature has identified different types of classifiers. Here I follow the adaptation of Engberg-Pedersen’s (1993) classification, proposed in Benedicto and Brentari (2004), which identifies 4 types based on morpho-syntactic criteria: whole entity classifiers (whose shape refers to the shape of the whole object/referent), handling classifiers (handshapes that refer to the way objects are held or manipulated), extension-and-surface (handshape refers to properties of the 1 I would like to thank the signers of all the Sign Languages that have contributed their languages and their knowledge about them to make these analyses possible. Benedicto, Elena. Classifiers as Agreement… or not?. 2018. In L. Chapman and I. Rudmila (eds), Festschrift for Peggy Speas. UMOP, University of Massachusetts.