In Churchward (1953) a set of Tongan nouns are labeled 'local', that is "construed as if it were the proper name of a place" (p. 88). Some of these nouns reappear under another label, that is, 'preposed' nouns (p. 214-16) and they are defined as nouns that can be "placed immediately before another noun instead of being connected with it by means of a preposition" (p.214). This peculiarity was exploited by Broschart (1993) to argue for a subset of these nouns to be considered as classifiers. In this work the author tries to clarify the border of this fuzzy subset of Tongan nouns differently addressed by Churchward and Broschard.