*2.3. Analysis*

In our investigation of classifier handshapes, we analyse responses to one stimulus clip of a bottle falling (shown in Figure 10). Finding a target item in our data set that consistenly elicited classifiers from a high number of signers was difficult, a problem made more obstructive by the small number of possible Cena participants. The bottle clip most consistently elicited use of classifiers, meaning that we had usable responses from all but one participant. We coded handshapes used to depict the referent when it is involved in some verb event as entity classifiers. Any classifiers that only depicted the extension of the object were coded as SaSSes. These could be static (perhaps depicting the height of the object) or have movement tracing its shape. For a classifier with movement to be classified as a SaSS, the movement must only depict the dimensions of the object, and no verb event. All tokens of a variable of interest in a participant's response were coded. For example, if a participant used two entity classifiers with different handshapes to represent the bottle (perhaps one as the bottle wobbled and one as it fell), both were coded separately and used in the analysis.

**Figure 10.** Still images from the stimulus video depicting a bottle falling.

In the analysis of movement, we looked at five of the Haifa clips: a ball bouncing, a ball rolling, a girl running in a circle, a woman walking, and a woman running. We assigned

one possible value out of two for movement encoding: *simultaneous* in cases where path and manner were encoded in the same classifier construction, *sequential* when a verb event was split into two signs within a phrase, one providing the manner and the other the path. If a participant provided both a simultaneous and a sequential depiction of a verb event in their response, both were coded. In some responses, signers provided both a simultaneous encoding and another additional sign encoding manner or path only. For such responses the simultaneous construction was recorded, and the additional sign excluded from the analysis. Responses that only included manner or path were also excluded.
