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The category of person has both inflectional and lexical aspects, and the distinction provides a finely graduated grammatical trait, relatively stable in both families and areas, and revealing for both typology and linguistic geography. Inflectional behavior includes reference to speech-Act roles, indexation of arguments, discreteness from other categories such as number or gender, assignment and/or placement in syntax, arrangement in paradigms, and general resemblance to closed-class items. Lexical behavior includes sharing categories and/or forms and/or syntactic behavior with major lexical classes (usually nouns) and generally resembling open-class items. Criteria are given here for typologizing person as more vs. less inflectional, some basic typological correlations are tested, and the worldwide linguistic-geographical distribution is mapped.

In this article two hypotheses about the relationship of verbal and adnominal agreement are proposed: first, it is claimed that languages tend to have adnominal agreement only if they also have verbal agreement, but not vice versa. Second, it is argued that languages with adnominal agreement are areally restricted, while languages with verbal agreement are not. A sample of languages was selected to test these hypotheses, and both are confirmed by the data. The article closes with an admittedly speculative explanation of the hypotheses involving patterns of grammaticalization of different types of agreement markers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]