It is sometimes suggested that the sign person is an agentive suffix, since it can attach to verbs and non-agentive nouns to yield an agentive noun. For instance, the sign person can immediately follow the verb play or the noun art, resulting in the meanings ‘player’ and ‘artist’, respectively. However, the sign person is a lexical noun, which occurs freely as well. It is, thus, not a bound morpheme but a free morpheme. We therefore do not treat combinations of person with verbs and nouns as cases of derivational morphology, but rather as instances of compounding (see MORPHOLOGY Chapter 1).