linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, a feature of a word or phrase is said to be covert if there is no surface evidence of its existence within that word or phrase. For example, many languages have covert

grammatical gender In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages wit ...

in nouns, in that there is no way to tell from the form of a noun which gender it is; gender only becomes apparent in, for example, articles and adjectival agreement, which depend on gender. In German instruction, the article (''der'', ''die'', ''das'') is generally taught along with a noun, so that the student may remember which gender the noun is. In spoken French,

grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a Feature (linguistics), feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement (linguistics), agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and many other ...

is largely covert: the singular and plural forms of most nouns are identical in pronunciation. However, number is still relevant, as it affects articles and verbal agreement, so it is still logical to say that one instance of a noun is singular, and that another instance, pronounced identically, is plural. A covert feature is different from a null morpheme, such as the English singular, which is marked by the ''absence'' of a morpheme that occurs elsewhere. That is, whereas in English the null-marked singular contrasts with an overt ''-s'' plural in most nouns, in French both singular and plural are null; in English it is clear that ''cat'' is singular, because it is not the plural ''cats'', whereas in spoken French, it cannot be known whether ''chat(s)'' spoken in isolation is singular or plural.

See also