Depicting verbs, like verbs in general, encode meanings related to actions and states. What distinguishes depicting verbs from other verbs is that, in addition to their encoded meanings, these verbs also depict certain aspects of their meanings. This duality, involving both a symbolic lexical verb and depiction, has led to considerable analytical difficulties since these verbs began to be analyzed in the 1970s. Analysts have wanted to see these verbs as entirely symbolic or entirely depictive.

Initially, all verbs capable of being directed in space were called directional verbs (Fischer and Gough 1978) or multidirectional verbs (Friedman 1976). This large category of verbs included all the types of verbs described in previous chapters as well as depicting verbs. One subcategory of directional signs had characteristics that appeared to distinguish its members from other directional signs. Frishberg (1975) described such signs as being produced with “handshapes in particular orientations to stand for certain semantic features of noun arguments” (p. 715). Frishberg called these oriented handshapes classifiers and the signs containing them came to be called classifier predicates (Liddell 1977) or verbs of motion and location (Supalla 1978). A group of researchers at the University of California at Berkeley used the term markers rather than classifiers. This terminology appears, for example, in Mandel (1977), DeMatteo (1977), and Friedman (1975, 1977). The terminology was not widely adopted by others.