Drawing on data from over five hundred languages, Anna Siewierska compares the use of person within and across different languages, and examines the factors underlying variation. Siewierska demonstrates how person forms vary in substance (how large they are), in the nature of the semantic distinctions they convey (e.g., gender, number, case), and in their use in sentences and discourse. The textbook covers the grammatical category of person, which includes the first person (the speaker), the second person (the hearer), and the third person (neither the speaker nor the hearer).