I claim that Bora classifiers have the structural status of (bound) nouns, based on facts like the following: Some classifiers also occur as independent nouns (possibly with minor phonological differences). Classifiers have the referential properties typical of nouns. Like typical nominals, they denote classes of objects and may refer to a member of the class they denote. They are never used to attribute properties to another referring expresssion. Classifiers have the distribution typical of nouns: they may be a clausal subject, they may be modified by a relative clause, they may have a prepositional complement, and so forth.
And classifiers head noun phrases, a claim for which various arguments are given, among them one based on the remarkable similarity between the host-classifier and possessor-possessed constructions
