(What) Do verb classifiers classify?

•‘Verb classifiers’ resemble nominal classification devices and are interpreted as such.•This sample study investigates the formal and functional behaviour of ‘verb classifier systems’.•A separation of the notion of ‘verb classifiers’ and nominal classifiers is advised.

In this paper, I investigate the phenomenon of ‘verb classifiers’, i.e. nominal classifiers that attach to the verb and that classify one of its arguments. A sample of thirteen supposed ‘verb classifier’ languages is presented and analysed in detail; the elicited data argues against the maintenance of the general theoretical notion of an independent classifier type of ‘verb classifiers’, since the analysed systems either modify the concept expressed by the predicate (and thus do not classify a verbal argument) or mark a verbal argument instead of classifying it.